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RESEARCHING THE
Critical reflections from the social sciences
Edited by
Nancy Worth and Irene Hardill
RESEARCHING THE LIFECOURSE
Critical reflections from
the social sciences
Edited by Nancy Worth and Irene Hardill
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

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Contents
List of tables and figures vii

Notes on contributors viii

Acknowledgements xii

one Introduction 1

Part I: Time
two Time and the lifecourse: perspectives from qualitative 25

longitudinal research
Bren Neale
three Time in mixed methods longitudinal research: working 43

across written narratives and large scale panel survey data
to investigate attitudes to volunteering
Rose Lindsey, Elizabeth Metcalfe and Rosalind Edwards
four A restudy of young workers from the 1960s: researching 63

intersections of work and lifecourse in one locality over
50 years
John Goodwin and Henrietta O’Connor
five A method for collecting lifecourse data: assessing the 81

utility of the lifegrid
Ann Del Bianco
Part II: Space and place

six Life geohistories: examining formative experiences and 101

geographies
Bisola Falola
seven Using mapmaking to research the geographies of young 123

children affected by political violence
Bree Akesson
eight Keeping in touch: studying the personal communities of 143

women in their fifties
Sophie Bowlby
nine Triangulation with softGIS in lifecourse research: 161

situated action possibilities and embodied knowledge
Kaisa Schmidt-Thomé
v
Researching the lifecourse
Part III: Mobilities

ten Using a life history approach within transnational 183

ethnography: a case study of Korean New Zealander
returnees
Jane Yeonjae Lee
eleven Sensing sense and mobility at the end of the lifecourse: 199

a methodology of embodied interaction
Anne Leonora Blaakilde
twelve Event history approach to life spaces in French-speaking 215

research
Françoise Dureau, Matthieu Giroud and Christophe Imbert
thirteen Using an intersectional lifecourse approach to understand 231

the migration of the highly skilled
Melissa Kelly
Index 247

vi
List of tables and figures
Tables
3.1 Qualitative and quantitative data fit 46

4.1 Tracing the respondents: contact methods and responses 75

4.2 Sample descriptions and composition 76

6.1 Constructing personal geographies: methods for 114

gathering locational experiences and space–time data
8.1 Selected socioeconomic characteristics of the areas used 147

for finding a sample
8.2 Main themes used in coding 153

10.1 Interview questions/prompts: a lifecourse approach 187

10.2 Different kinds of observations 189

10.3 Author’s positionality 192

12.1 Status of places frequented 225

Figures
5.1 Sample lifegrid 84

6.1 Roxanne’s map 105

6.2 Lexi’s map 106

7.1 Four examples of ‘home’ drawn by children 129

7.2 Eight-year-old Salima’s map of her neighbourhood community 131

7.3 Seven-year-old Nadir’s map 135

8.1 Recruitment flier 148

8.2 Diagrammatic representation of Charlotte’s personal 149

community map
8.3 Number of friends and family in each ring for Alison 151

9.1 Starting points of my triangulation 165

9.2 Building further interconnections between data, stories 168

and geohabits
9.3 Approaching habitus from various perspectives 170

9.4 Direct quotes from the interviewee 173

12.1 Biographical matrix used to record multi-residence 222

trajectories
12.2 Number of places frequented other than main residence, 226

by age and trajectory class
vii
Notes on contributors
Bree Akesson is assistant professor of social work at Wilfrid Laurier
University, Canada, as well as treatment facilitator for the Child
Psychiatric Epidemiology Group. Her current research is focused on the
effects of political violence on young children and their families. She is
co-editor of the forthcoming book Children Affected by Armed Conflict:
Theory, Method, and Practice published by Columbia University Press.
Anne Leonora Blaakilde is associate professor at Department of

Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen,
Denmark. She is a folklorist, working with migration, family, and
gender in a lifecourse perspective. She recently co-edited with Gabriella
Nilsson Nordic Seniors on the Move. Mobility and Migration in Later Life,
Lund Studies in Arts and Cultural Sciences. Since 2004 she has been
the editor of the Danish journal Gerontologi.
Sophie Bowlby is visiting professor in geography at Loughborough

University and honorary research fellow in geography and
environmental science at the University of Reading, UK. She is a
fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Her research has focused on
feminist analysis of issues of access, employment and social relationships
of informal care in time-space. Her recent research has focused on care,
friendship and social inclusion among children and young people and
also among women in their fifties.
Ann Del Bianco is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Environmental

Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her recent past
appointment was a senior researcher in the field of occupational
cancer. Ann’s publications and research interests are in the areas of:
alternative methodological approaches, the lifegrid, oesophageal
cancer, environmental and occupational cancer, cancer prevention,
and environmental and ecosystem health.
Françoise Dureau is honorary research director in geography and

demography, member of the laboratory Migrinter (International
Migration: Space and Societies), Université de Poitiers, France. Her
work focuses on practices of spatial mobility and transformation of
urban spaces. She has published or co-published 15 books, including:
Métropoles en mouvement (Anthropos); L’accès à la ville: les mobilités
spatiales en questions (L’Harmattan); Les mondes de la mobilité (Presses
viii
Universitaires de Rennes); Mobilités et changement urbain: Bogotá, Santiago

et São Paulo (Presses Universitaires de Rennes).
Rosalind Edwards is professor of sociology, social sciences director

of research and enterprise, and a co-director of the ESRC National
Centre for Research Methods at the University of Southampton, UK.
She is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Ros is co-editor of
the International Journal of Social Research Methodology, and has written
about qualitative and mixed methods. She has published widely in the
field of family studies, with her most recent book being Understanding
Families Over Time: Research and Policy for Palgrave Macmillan.
Bisola Falola is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography

and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin (USA).
Her current research examines social and spatial mobility with urban
minority youth. Her work also focuses on examining youth geographies
and young people’s transitions to adulthood in the Global North and
South. She is also interested in examining emotional and affective
geographies, futurity and landscapes of the future and in conducting
urban ecological research, particularly on issues related to ecological
gentrification.
Matthieu Giroud is assistant professor in geography at Université

Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée (France), and member of the laboratory
Analyse Comparée des Pouvoirs. His work focuses on popular
continuities in neighbourhoods undergoing gentrification. He has
co-edited many publications including Les mobilités spatiales dans les
villes intermédiaires. Territoires, pratiques, régulations (Presses universitaires
Blaise Pascal) or Métropoles en débat. (Dé)constructions de la ville compétitive
(Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest).
John Goodwin is professor of sociology at the University of Leicester,

UK. John has expertise in qualitative secondary analysis, restudies,
biographical methods and the use of unconventional data sources in
sociological research. He has published widely in areas such as youth
transitions, work and employment and the history of sociology.
Irene Hardill is professor of public policy and director of the

Northumbria Centre for Citizenship and Civil Society, Northumbria
University, UK. She has a particular expertise in volunteering and
the voluntary and community sector, demography and ageing, and
knowledge exchange and user engagement. Recent books include
ix
Enterprising Care: Unpaid Voluntary Action in the 21st Century for Policy
Press with Dr Sue Baines (MMU, UK) and Knowledge Mobilisation and
the Social Sciences for Routledge with Jon Bannister.
Christophe Imbert is assistant professor in geography, Université

de Poitiers (France), and member of the laboratory Migrinter
(International Migration: Space and Societies). He has co-edited the
publication D’une métropole à l’autre: pratiques urbaines et circulations dans
l’espace européen (Armand Colin). He’s working on settlement patterns
in France and Portugal and their relationships with lifestyles dynamics.
Melissa Kelly is a postdoctoral fellow in the Narrative Study of Lives

Programme in the Department of Sociology at the University of the
Free State in South Africa. She has published several book chapters and
journal articles on migration decision making, identity and belonging.
Her current research considers how life history narratives can be used
to understand the experiences of highly skilled cross-border migrants
in South Africa.
Jane Yeonjae Lee is a postdoctoral fellow at the Humanities Center

at Northeastern University, USA, working on the Living in the Mobility
Transition research project under her supervisor Tim Cresswell. Jane’s
PhD thesis examined the everyday lives of Korean New Zealander
returnees. Her research interests and publications surround topics
of migration and mobilities, national/ethnic identities, religion, and
health.
Rose Lindsey is based in the division of Sociology, Social Policy

and Criminology at the University of Southampton, UK. She is the
principal investigator for an ESRC-funded project on ‘Continuity and
Change in Volunteering 1981-2012’ for which she is writing a co-
authored book entitled Continuity and Change in Voluntary Action for
Policy Press. She is also principal investigator for another ESRC-funded
project on ‘Defining Mass Observation’, a longitudinal mixed-method
project that aims to increase knowledge of the Mass Observation
Project’s volunteer writers.
Elizabeth Metcalfe currently works as a quantitative researcher on

the ESRC funded project ‘Continuity and Change in Volunteering
1981-2012’, based in the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at the
University of Southampton, UK. She is a co-author for a forthcoming
book entitled Continuity and Change in Voluntary Action. Following this
x
project, she will undertake a position as a statistical analyst at the Office

of National Statistics. Elizabeth’s PhD from the University of Leeds
was a mixed-method project that explored how ‘place’ influences acute
coronary syndrome outcome among older people.
Bren Neale is professor of life course and family research in the

School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds (UK) and
a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She specialises in research
on the dynamics of family life and intergenerational relationships and
has published widely in this field. As director of ESRC Timescapes,
Bren has supported the development of qualitative longitudinal (QL)
research across academia and in government and NGO settings.
Henrietta O’Connor is professor of sociology at the Department

of Sociology, University of Leicester, UK. Her current work is based
on analysis of qualitative data, qualitative longitudinal research and
community restudies. Henrietta has particular expertise on paradata,
marginalia and fieldnotes. She has published extensively on Internet
methods, youth and work.
Kaisa Schmidt-Thomé holds a licentiate in planning geography at

the University of Helsinki (Finland) and works as a research fellow in
the Department of Real Estate, Planning and Geoinformatics at Aalto
University, Finland. Her main research interests focus on European
urban development strategies as well as on the interplay of our physical
environment and the everyday urban experience.
Nancy Worth is a Banting Fellow in the School of Geography and

Earth Sciences at McMaster University, Canada. Her current research
examines work and social life with millennial women. She has published
on temporality, sociality, mobilities and young people’s transition to
adulthood in journals such as Area, Urban Studies and Geoforum. She
recently co-edited Intergenerational Space for Routledge.
xi
Acknowledgements
Nancy and Irene wish to thank all the contributors to the book for
their dedication to the project. We also wish to thank the team at
Policy Press, especially Emily Watt, Laura Vickers and Laura Greaves
for their support and expertise.
xii
ONE
Introduction
Lifecourse research is undertaken by researchers from across the social

sciences, often working in a multidisciplinary context, using the
lifecourse as an underpinning concept and/or a method of study. In
this book we aim to represent the diversity of lifecourse methodologies
employed in the social sciences, as well as having a concern for
epistemology – how different knowledge claims are connected to our
research practices. Moreover, the contributors in this edited book
emphasise how different theoretical frameworks and positionality affect
the research process – each contributor examines the challenges of
their research design and how they worked through methodological
issues – providing reflexive accounts of the process of lifecourse research,
including a focus on ethical issues.
This collection has its origins in a series of conference sessions
held at the American Association of Geographers’ (AAG) Annual
Meeting in 2012 in New York City. Besides a theme of lifecourse
research, we were interested in hearing methodological reflections
– why researchers approach particular questions in particular ways.
Geography matters to all social scientists who employ the lifecourse
as a concept and a method of enquiry, as spaces and places form the
geographical context of a person’s lifecourse. Inspired by the work
of Law (2004, p 5), who argues that ‘methods, their rules, and even
more methods’ practices, not only describe but also help to produce
the reality that they understand’, we turned our attention to methods
in lifecourse research not as a primer on how to do research but as a
way of thinking though the power of method to generate the results
of our research. It seemed to us that these vital questions of practice
are often left out of published empirical and theoretical work on the
lifecourse, where discussions of the complexities of research design and
its implementation are sacrificed in favour of polished accounts of final
results. The AAG sessions provoked a lively discussion about how we
do lifecourse research in different ways both within and across social
science disciplines. We also shared stories of what methods worked in
our research, which ones failed spectacularly and which ones needed
1
to be adapted carefully to fit our inquiries, thinking through multiple

ways of understanding ‘best practice’ and being ethically responsible to
our research participants. Returning to Law (2004) and his wider call
for more ‘mess’ in social science research, this collection represents our
efforts to draw attention to how methods capture social life.
Conceptualising the lifecourse: age, generation and

transition
The lifecourse implies not simply chronological age but addresses
individual and collective trajectories of experience in space, in place
and through time as these are shaped by events, roles, memory and
retrospection. As defined by the well-known sociologist and pioneer
in the field, Glen Elder, the lifecourse is ‘a sequence of socially defined
events and roles that the individual enacts over time’ (Giele and Elder,
1998, p 22). A lifecourse approach affords researchers the possibility
to examine an individual’s life history using a variety of data gathering
tools, and to understand how early events influence future decisions
and events such as marriage and divorce or involvement in crime.
Engaging qualitatively or quantitatively with time, space and mobilities
enables a more finely grained understanding of everyday life, and the
uncovering of how the personal is interlinked with the immediate and
wider social context.
Sociologists began using the lifecourse as a framework for the study
of human lives and social change in the 20th century. The lifecourse
as a theoretical orientation came from the desire to understand social
pathways, their developmental effects, and their relation to personal and
social-historical conditions. From this innovative work the lifecourse
as an organising concept and a research method began to be employed
by academics across the social sciences.
The pioneering study The Polish Peasant in Europe and America
(1918–20) was undertaken by Thomas and Znaniecki, and made use of
life histories and trajectories. Thomas argued for the employment of a
longitudinal approach (cf Mortimer and Shanahan, 2004), a view that
was echoed by C. Wright Mills (1959) in the post war period. Within
psychology, ambitious longitudinal studies were undertaken before the
Second World War. One indicative example is the Oakland Growth
Study of children born in 1920–21 (Jones et al, 1971). Such studies
collected a wealth of data and some extended to study their research
participants into adulthood. The participants in these childhood
studies experienced enormous social change, and the wealth of data
collected resulted in the emergence of new ways of thinking about
2
Introduction
human lives and development. The changing demographic profile of

the population, the result of increasing longevity, declining fertility and
mortality, led to social scientists seeking to understand the lives of older
people. This field of research was pioneered by Bernice Neugarten in
the 1950s (Neugarten, 1996), and such studies helped to demonstrate
the enormous diversity of people’s lives, and how social norms give
meaning to, and even direct, individual trajectories.
A further push towards the more complex treatment of human lives
through longitudinal research projects occurred in the 1960s, and
involved both prospective and retrospective data collection. Such an
approach allowed for the collection of detailed life histories (Giele and
Elder, 1998). This innovation went hand-in-hand with developments
in empirical procedures, statistical techniques and interpretative
approaches, which are at the heart of quantitative lifecourse research
(Giele and Elder, 1998). Although lifecourse developments in the
US have been quantitative to a large extent, a distinctive emphasis in
European studies has centred on using individual biographies and in-
depth interviews (Heinz and Krüger, 2001). Social scientists have also
placed emphasis on understanding the context in which individual lives
are lived, including social pathways, such as the family cycle, which
was conceived of as a set of ordered stages (Hill, 1970). A second such
organising concept that has been used is of the ‘career’. The career
has been employed as a way of linking roles across the lifecourse for
individuals and the households in which they are situated (Green et
al, 1999).
In contemporary research on the lifecourse, three concepts
predominate – age, generation and transitions, which in the following
sections we examine in detail. Age is relational, employed to add context
to lived experience, while generation is used as a way of temporally
positioning people in relation to one another, while the concept of
transitions is used to think through change across the lifecourse.
Age from a lifecourse approach
Before we go further we will distinguish age as biological/physiological

ageing, chronological age and age as a social construction. Biological
ageing is the progressive decline in physiological ability to meet
demands that occur over time. Chronological age refers to the number
of years a person has lived. Age as a social construction refers to the
social understandings and significance that are attached to chronological
age. This understanding of age can structure the lifecourse through
age expectations, social timetables, and generalised age grades such
3
as childhood. Age represents not only a point in the life span and a
historical marker but also a subjective understanding about the temporal
nature of life. From a lifecourse approach, age is relational – adding
context across an individual’s experience and allowing comparison
to a cohort (Hopkins and Pain, 2007). Both age and lifecourse can
be understood as socially constructed – what it means to be 18 for
example depends on one’s culture, as do the various age boundaries
that are seen as important. In general,
the life course is organized around the system of labour that

prevails in society. This applies to the shape of the lifecourse
– its most obvious temporal ordering today has become
the tripartition into periods of preparation, ‘activity’, and
retirement – as well as to its organizing principle. (Kohli,
1986, p 272)
Work also structures many of our transitions through the lifecourse

(Marshall et al, 2001). However, there is increasing attention on
‘alternative’ lifecourses that challenge age boundaries, including lifelong
learning (Biesta and Tedder, 2007) and children working (Jennings et al,
2006). Studies of age from a lifecourse perspective are often rooted in
place – including school, the workplace and retirement communities.
This focus on age segregated institutions reflects the organisation of
many societies in the global north, yet this is slowly changing to reflect
less rigid adherence to the tripartite schema of education, work and
leisure as, for some, lifestyles and life choices become less tied to age
expectations.
A further illustration of the power of the lifecourse to unite social
scientists and scientists was recently seen in the UK in the New
Dynamics of Ageing Research Programme (NDA), which was
established by five of the UK Research Councils to better understand
the way in which older people’s lives may be changing as a result of
social, economic and technical developments.1 Although the lives of
people over 50 years was the focus of study (Hennessey and Walker,
2011; Walker, 2007), the lifecourse was employed as an underpinning
concept and as a method of study (Hardill and Olphert, 2012;
Schwanen et al, 2012). With the exception of research on lifecourse and
migration, there has tended to be more interest in the lives of children
and young people and of older people, than in those in adulthood and
midlife (although see Katz et al, 2012).
4
Introduction
Generation and intergenerationality
Generation is employed within the social sciences as a way of temporally

positioning people in relation to one another within a family lineage
and also has extra-familial uses that attempt to group people based
on their time of birth, though the latter is also defined in terms of
cohort (Alwin and McCammon, 2003; Szydlik, 2012). Drawing on
the notion of generations developed by Karl Mannheim (1952 [1927])
in his essay, ‘On The Problem of Generations’, in which he recognised
that generations are not internally homogeneous but consist of
‘generational units’ that can be differentiated based on factors including
class, human geographers have examined the sociospatial consequences
of the generational ordering of society. This extra-familial notion of
generation is more or less analogous to the demographic notion of
‘cohort’, a concept that refers to a group of people born within a
particular period of time.
Traditionally social scientists have compartmentalised the study
of age into the study of younger and older generations (midlife
has been studied less), but the concept of intergenerationality can
also be employed to think relationally, addressing connections and
interactions between generational groups (Vanderbeck and Worth,
2014). Viewing intergenerationality as an aspect of social identity
suggests that individuals’ and groups’ sense of themselves and others is
partly based on generational difference or sameness. Moreover, these
identities are not seen as fixed but dynamic, with variability reflecting
differently situated contexts including systems of kinship and cultural
understandings of age and generation. Intergenerationality has largely
been studied within the family, including intra-family geographies of
parenting, parent–child relations, grandparent–grandchild relations,
and extra-familial relations. Through this approach how people’s lives
are linked and interdependent has been studied, including geographies
of childhood, old age and gendering.
Transitions and trajectories
Finally, a recent development in lifecourse research involves paying

attention to transitions, particularly to young people (such as transitions
from youth to adulthood or transitions they make between institutions
such as school and university), but there is also work on transitions
in familial relations in later life, including grandparenthood and
retirement. Transitions are periods of change; they are dynamic rather
than determined, marking positional change within life trajectories,
5
which can be conceived of as pathways. Many researchers trace research

on lifecourse transitions back to van Gennep’s (2004 [1909]) work Rites
of Passage. Grenier (2012, p 41) uses a quote from van Gennep – ‘a
man [sic] cannot pass from one to the other without going through
an intermediate stage’[…] ‘he wavers between two worlds’ – to claim
‘that a move from one status to another is accompanied by a period
of time spent in a transitional or liminal space’. More recently, Andy
Furlong (2013) has traced the changing approach to transitions
research by looking at how transition metaphors have evolved, starting
with developmental psychology approaches in the 1960s. Based
on the work of Erikson (1968) and others, direct transitions led to
various ‘occupational niches’. In the 1970s, ‘routes’ and ‘pathways’
dominated the literature, as a result of more complicated transitions
in the labour market; in the 1980s ‘trajectory’ became popular, as
transitions became less linear and often took longer. Structuralism
guided research, focusing on the power of social class and institutions.
By the 1990s, there was a greater recognition of agency and transition
metaphors shifted to ‘navigation’ and researchers examined the choices
and possibilities for young people to determine their own future.
Contemporary transitions research, focusing on youth but also older
people, often blends structural and agential approaches – recognising
the power of both on the lifecourse.
Much current work on transitions considers the ‘destandardisation’
of the lifecourse, where traditional markers of a ‘successful’ life are no
longer normative (Brückner and Mayer, 2005; Worth, 2009b). Here,
the interest lies in a more intersectional understanding, considering how
different social identities influence age and the lifecourse (James and
Hockey, 2003; Ecclestone, Biesta and Hughes, 2009). Recent research
has worked on pulling apart different aspects of modern transitions,
investigating the ‘boomerang’ transition of young people returning to
their parental home after higher/further education (Stone et al, 2014);
experiences of migration, especially for economic opportunity (Punch,
2014); and deferred transitions to retirement (Kim and Moen, 2002).
Lifecourse methodology and epistemological choices

In this collection we are concerned with the process of lifecourse
research, both the practical questions of research design and praxis as
well as questions of epistemology. In particular, we are interested in
shedding light on ‘epistemic cultures: those amalgams of arrangements
and mechanisms – bonded through affinity, necessity, and historical
co-incidence – which, in a given field, make up how we know what we
6
Introduction
know’ (Knorr-Cetina, 1999, p 1). Building on work in science studies,

there has recently been attempts to consider knowledge production
in the social sciences, the ‘turn to practice’ where Camic et al’s (2011,
pp ix–x), aim is to ‘raise the general level of understanding of the
processes by which different forms of social knowledge are produced,
evaluated, and put to use’.
Lifecourse research is inherently a multidisciplinary social science;
compared to Knorr-Cetina’s project of comparing knowledge
production in biology and physics, lifecourse research in itself has
many different ‘systems of thinking’, each with its own history. We
argue that lifecourse acts like a ‘boundary object’ in multidisciplinary
research (Star and Griesemer, 1989). Boundary objects help people
from different disciplines, domains and communities build a shared
understanding. A boundary object can be an artefact, an image, a text
or an idea. It will be interpreted differently by the different participants.
Acknowledgement and discussion of these differences enables a shared
understanding to be formed. So, while qualitative and quantitative
approaches may share a broad grounding in empiricism, what counts
as ‘appropriate’ or ‘valid’ data, and how it is attained, can vary greatly.
The range of methods employed in this collection is quite wide,
including quantitative studies that often use census materials and other
large data bases, in-depth qualitative approaches, including diverse
visual methods, and methodological approaches that mix methods to
capture information from several perspectives.
Quantitative approaches
The application of quantitative methods in lifecourse research is

common, with human geographers, for example, employing the
lifecourse in the analysis of national or regional patterns or processes
such as migration between communities, within countries, and intra-
urban residential movements as these vary across life stages, place and
time (Green et al, 1999). These have considered both individual and
household scales and have drawn on sources such as the long form
collected by the US Census that includes data from two time periods,
on specialised publically available data sets such as the American
Community Survey, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics in the
US that since 1968 has measured economic, social and health aspects
of a large representative sample of families and their descendants.
Outside the US, similar sources include the British Household Panel
Survey, the German Socio-Economic Panel, and the Household
Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey (see Lindsey et
7
al, Chapter Three in this collection). These include data that lend
themselves to cartographic and graphic analysis and portrayal, and to
statistical analysis with such techniques as logistic regression modelling
and multiple regression analysis. By disaggregating groups on multiple
variables they examine interactions, for example, by gender, age, marital
status, income level, education, and place of origin. In so doing they
demonstrate complexities of choices and behaviours in multiple stages
of life beyond traditional notions of youth, midlife and old age, and
also reveal issues of intergenerational relations and changing patterns
of marriage. In recent years authors have been able to link individuals
within their household context, for example in the UK this has been
possible since the 1991 Census of Population with the publication of
household data in the Sample of Anonymised Records (SARs) (Green
et al, 1999).
Qualitative methods
An array of qualitative methods characterises much lifecourse research.

Many studies employ in-depth qualitative interviews to investigate
subjective interpretations and understandings of life histories (see
chapters from Bowlby, Goodwin and O’Connor, Lee, Del Bianco and
Kelly in this collection). The interview may take a number of forms,
such as structured, semi-structured or open-ended; with structured and
some semi-structured interviews gathering interviewees’ knowledge
and experience of the outside world. In contrast, in more flexible
interview formats, participants in the interview are seen as agents who
construct meanings ‘subjectively’ not as objectively ‘found’, a view
that is associated within feminist, life history and psychosocial studies.
The in-depth interview is a collaborative process, constructed through
the unique interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee,
and as a technique it has been subject to evaluation and critique (see
Bowlby’s chapter). Qualitative interviews, including field notes and
digital recordings, need to be transcribed and analysed. Researchers
increasingly use qualitative software packages in combination with
reading and re-reading transcripts to facilitate data analysis. While such
interviews yield rich data, the analysis is not always straightforward
(Valentine, 1999).
Qualitative interviews are commonly undertaken with a purposive
sample (or a judgemental sample), one that is selected based on the
knowledge of a population and the purpose of the study. It can be
very useful for situations in which a targeted sample exhibiting certain
characteristics needs to be reached quickly and where sampling for
8
Introduction
proportionality is not the main concern. Purposive sampling is not

confined to lifecourse research but is used to select participants to
explore issues such as personal and household biographies. It often
forms part of a mixed methods approach. Indicative of such an approach
are studies of the location and mobility decisions of heterosexual
dual-career households in the UK by Hardill and colleagues (Hardill,
Green and Dudleston, 1997). There they worked through contacts
with employers representing different economic sectors who helped
the team identify approximately 140 dual-career households, who
then responded to a semi-structured self-completion questionnaire
survey. A subset (purposive sample) of 30 households was selected for
in-depth interviews, both partners were interviewed together and then
separately to gain insights into household decision making relating to
career prioritisation.
Some social scientists engage with phenomenology to explore
deeper personal meanings. This approach is important to acknowledge
for its capacities to reveal insights, and to interpret and challenge
preconceived notions of human experience over the lifecourse. A
key example bringing to light structures of consciousness and the
meanings of places is the pioneering study of Graham Rowles (1978)
who worked for a sustained period of time with five older men and
women in a single neighbourhood. The method seeks to reveal the
first person point of view, the significance of objects, events, of the self
and others, and the flow of time in and over life. As an approach this
project required suspending the researcher’s potential pre-judgements
and stereotypes, following the subjects’ conversational leads, sensitivity
to their capabilities and preferences, considering daily and longer time
frames, and engagement in their varied and multiple spaces. Some social
scientists reflect on their personal experiences of the lifecourse and
those in their own families or of people with whom they have close
associations. British geographer Linda McDowell (2013a, 2013b) used
personal reflections to explore generational changes in mobility, work
and familial lives both within their own settings and cross culturally.
A growing number of studies engage with participatory (action)
research, which refers to a variety of research practices that involve
collaborative research, education and action that is oriented towards
social change (Kindon et al, 2008). This method takes lived experience
as a starting point with approaches that aim to lessen hierarchies
between researchers, facilitators and participants, and to generate
accurate and reliable data using ethical and inclusive approaches. It has
been used in both the global north and south, and with diverse age
groups, especially with children and young people. It often employs
9
contemporary technologies, such as community radio and TV, popular

theatre, public or community art, small format video, disposable
cameras, internet, information and communication technologies
(ICTs), and auto-photography. Video is increasingly used to raise
awareness of social difference or inequality for public education and
advocacy. Although children may participate in collaborative and
creative ways, they are not always involved in designing the research,
choosing what methods to use, or in the analysis or dissemination
that might result from it so that there is often participation in research
rather than participatory research per se. While this work is valuable it
may not result in longer term or deeper changes that might be needed
if children’s power and influence are to be increased in decisions that
ultimately affect their lives.
Mixing methods
For a number of years lifecourse researchers have combined the

collection and analysis of quantitative and qualitative data, bringing
together census data or large scale surveys with qualitative data derived
from surveys conducted by the research team, and sometimes by
multidisciplinary teams. The central premise of combining methods
in a single study or series of studies is that together they provide a
better understanding of research problems than either approach alone.
The burgeoning research with children and youth has perhaps been
the most experimental in mixing methods. Groups of young people
are engaged, for example, with visual methods such as creating videos,
photographing their environments, and/or making drawings and in
activities such as local walks or games. These may then be combined
with semi-structured interviews as illustrated by Worth’s (2009a, 2011)
study of transitions to adulthood that combined narrative interviews,
audio diaries and a participatory life mapping tool to capture the
complexity of young people’s experiences. Many examples of the use
of these creative and experiential methods are reported in the journal
Children’s Geographies (for example, see Kesby, 2007). In identifying this
range of mixed methods, we note that geospatial technologies have not
been widely used in lifecourse studies, although see Schmidt-Thomé’s
work in Chapter Nine of this collection.
Ethics and positionality
Recurring themes in methodological discussions in the lifecourse

literature, especially that on children and those working with
10
Introduction
vulnerable older adults, are ethical and political aspects of research. The
complexities of these concerns are especially, but not only raised, in
relation to ethical guidelines and clearance issues, including the ability
to give informed consent, to personal relations among researchers and
those being studied, to aspects of power relations when the research
involves engagement with couples or groups, not only between a
researcher and an individual participant. Protocols in the researcher’s
home institution, for example, may not mesh with those in a host
community, especially where research occurs in a foreign cultural
setting, and may involve multiple layers of review. Beyond such official
requirements, however, are ethical and political concerns that arise
when members of a group have differential power. These may involve
what are parental rights between adult researchers and young subjects,
how an adult researcher establishes rapport in engaging with youth
or children (Barker and Weller, 2003), or how gender and personal
relations impact in group interviews or collaborative creative projects.
The issues are further complicated if the research is being conducted in
different cultural settings, for example in the global south, by northern
researchers, where language differences and cultural expectations (for
example, in relation to local hierarchies or questions of payment for
participation) may arise (Sultana, 2007).
Another ethical consideration involves how we design research to
recognise diversity in the lifecourse. For example, there is a common
assumption in the literature that ‘families’ are composed of heterosexual
couples, of a married couple, a husband and wife (possibly with
children). But family arrangements today are changing – they are
diverse, fluid and unresolved, with a broad range of gender and kinship
relations in the postmodern family (Weeks et al, 2001). There is now a
greater choice of lifestyle: to live alone, with a partner (of the same or
other sex) or with other individuals; to stay single or marry; to remain
in or terminate relationships and subsequently divorce/marry/cohabit;
to forgo/postpone childbearing or to have children within/outside
marriage or other consensual unions. In settings where diseases such
as HIV/AIDS have disrupted families, researchers are finding particular
challenges, while those working with older adults find that adults
often live alone following bereavement. Though greater choice may
exist, living together remains a conjugal norm and the heterosexual
household remains the most common form in many lifecourses.
Finally, other examples that have been raised are whether and
how ‘insiders’ or ‘outsiders’ should be engaged in interpretation or
presentations (Ergun and Erdemir, 2010; Mullings, 1999). This is
especially the case when the methods include participatory action in
11
projects that aim not only to generate academic research but to bring
about social change that crosses boundaries between subjects and
practitioners in social or political community agencies. Joint interviews
can reveal shared realities, and household dynamics, while separate
interviews offer participants greater freedom to express individual views
by allowing them privacy, but they can disrupt collective memory or
understanding of events (Valentine, 1999). There is also a danger that
interviewees tell us what they think we want to hear or hold back
information for various reasons (see Bowlby, Chapter Eight). Finally,
some participants are ‘harder to reach’ than others, for example,
because they lack confidence, or because of age. Such a dilemma was
faced by Sophie Bowlby (Chapter Eight) in her study of women in
midlife. In the mixed age neighbourhoods that formed her fieldwork
sites, groups of older or younger women were much more visible than
middle-aged women.
Time, space and mobilities: the organisation of the

chapters
The following chapters examine the unique value of exploring lived
experience from a lifecourse perspective. The chapters encompass ideas
and observations from an array of social science disciplines, and direct
attention to the powerful connection between individual lives and the
historical and socioeconomic context in which these lives unfold. The
collection includes research on Canada, the United States, Finland,
Denmark, Sweden, Spain, France, the UK, Korea, New Zealand and
the Palestinian territories. This breadth demonstrates the international
interest in the concept of lifecourse as a powerful organising tool for
research in the social sciences. The major contribution of this collection
is its consideration of epistemological questions of lifecourse research
across the research themes of time, space and mobilities. Using these
themes, the chapters consider how different sources of knowledge –
archival, statistical, visual, narrative, observational, and so on – influence
our insights on the lifecourse, and in some cases multiple forms of
knowledge are used in combination. Moreover, some authors employ
a range of methods – quantitative and qualitative – combining the
two traditions, mixing methods. Each chapter introduces its aims,
discussing a case study project and its research design, including how
problems were addressed. The practicalities of lifecourse research are
also included, from data collection through to analysis, considering
how we develop knowledge claims. The goal of each chapter, and of
the collection as a whole, is to critically reflect on how method and
12
Introduction
methodology are implicated in our thinking on the lifecourse – why the

method matters. Chapters conclude by reflecting on the implications
of method for their particular research area.
We have chosen a conceptual approach to organise the collection to
highlight how important foci of lifecourse research can be researched
in diverse ways. The collection is organised around three research
themes: 1) time, 2) space and place, 3) mobilities. Therefore, rather
than simply an account of a particular method, the chapters are reflexive
examinations of lifecourse research, connecting discussions of theory
and practice by situating detailed discussions of methodology and
research design within relevant conceptual frameworks. Given this
organisation, the reader can approach the text in a variety of ways:
conceptually, for example, by engaging with a set of chapters on
migration and mobility; methodologically, reading about qualitative
or quantitative approaches; or epistemologically, thinking through
the subtleties of research and how our questions and methods shape
our findings.
Time
Time and temporality are critical to lifecourse research (Mills, 2000).

Mills argues that time is often thought of as a way of structuring
the lifecourse, including historical, biological and chronological
understandings of time. Elder (1994) contends that the ‘timing of lives’
is an asset of lifecourse research – whether life events such as marriage
or first job happen comparatively ‘early’ or ‘late’, as well as the relative
impact of major events, like a period of economic austerity. Yet time can
also be thought of subjectively, the idea of ‘lived time’, where we feel
time flow faster or slower, or a sense of time in one’s life by thinking
about the past, present and future – connecting memory, to current
experiences and expectations for the future (Adam, 1994; Ansell et al,
2014; Biggs, 1999). This is a social-constructionist approach, thinking
about the personal experience of time (Holstein and Gubrium, 2000).
The chapters highlight the multiple ways that temporality intercedes
in the lifecourse – from the chronological, including the intricacies
of collecting data over time, returning to a data set after a significant
amount of time has passed, charting key events year by year, to the
personal, where memory and selective narrations of history emphasise
important life transitions and experiences (for a fuller account see
Neale, Chapter Two). Therefore, rather than simply assuming time
is a stable force in lifecourse research, of days, months, and years,
13
researchers are now thinking about how time and temporality take an
active role in the lifecourse.
In Chapter Two Bren Neale discusses the possibilities offered by
qualitative longitudinal research for engaging critically with temporality.
Moreover, besides an interest in capturing the lifecourse as the flow of
lives, she also examines how lives ‘flow through time’, using the work
of Adam (1994) to consider fixed and fluid constructions of time. The
feature of this chapter is the way it takes complex ideas of temporality
and translates them into different research approaches with clarity. Neale
uses the metaphor of taking ‘slices of time’ to illustrate how lifecourse
research can engage with different dimensions of time, including: 1)
past-present-future; 2) micro-meso-macro; 3) intensive-extensive; 4)
continuities-discontinuities; and 5) timespace. Rose Lindsay, Elizabeth
Metcalfe and Ros Edwards continue with the focus on longitudinal
data but from a mixed qualitative–quantitative perspective, working
with narratives from the UK Mass Observation Archives and large
scale panel survey data (Chapter Three). Mass Observation (MO) was
established in 1937, using a team of observers and a panel of volunteer
writers to study the lives of ordinary people in the UK (Hubble, 2005).
The aim of MO was to enable the masses speak for themselves, to
make their voices heard above the din (Hinton, 2013, 3). Lindsay et
al’s work centres on the value of a mixed methods approach, where
gaps in one method are covered by another. The value of their chapter
lies in their discussion of the questions and complications that arise
when working with data sets that do not quite fit. Rather than try and
precisely compare intensive qualitative data and extensive quantitative
data, they outline an approach of complementarity, where different
kinds of data (using different conceptions of time) could productively
‘talk’ to each other.
In Chapter Four, John Goodwin and Henrietta O’Connor revisit
Norbert Elias’s lost Adjustment of Young Workers to Work Situations and
Adult Roles (1962–64) (see also Goodwin and O’Connor, 2006). Their
chapter evaluates the process of revisiting a forgotten research project
and turning it into a restudy, tracing young workers after 50 years to
see what has happened to them after significant deindustrialisation
and considerable labour market change in the locality. Goodwin and
O’Connor begin with an appeal to lifecourse researchers to reconsider
the value of ‘legacy studies’, arguing that classic research offers a
productive ‘starting point’ for contemporary research on the lifecourse.
The chapter focuses on how the restudy was done – including ethically
sensitive issues around contacting participants from the original study
and sharing the first data set with redacted interviewer notes. In the
14
Introduction
final chapter in this first part, Ann Del Bianco details the ‘lifegrid’
method, thinking through how research records time and memory in
an individual lifecourse (Chapter Five). A lifegrid is a chart that details
experiences year by year, blending key moments in the lifecourse – both
personal trajectories/transitions and external historical events – with
specific research questions to gain a holistic picture of a participant’s
lifecourse over time. Making links to important personal or historical
events can engage ‘flashbulb memories’ (Berney and Blane, 1997),
where participants can recall precise details about particular days in
their past, allowing retrospective research to be both comprehensive
and sensitive.
Space and place
The second part of the book, space and place, highlights the importance
of context in lifecourse research. Rather than biological considerations
of lifespan, or medical studies of age and ageing, the concept of
lifecourse in the social sciences is concerned with understanding
meaning in individual lives and how they are connected to processes
of social change. One important way of thinking this through is to
consider space not just as a container for life experiences, but as an
active producer – considering what Doreen Massey (2005) calls ‘the
life in space’. For a growing number of lifecourse researchers, thinking
about how the lifecourse is embedded within space, or examining
connections to specific places, adds depth to research (Katz and Monk,
1993). Moreover, Bailey (2009) argues that space and the ‘spatial
contingency’ of the lifecourse, offers an important analytical lens. This
emerges in research on work–life balance across the lifecourse, where
work is examined in multiple sites, including the home (Moen, 2010).
Larger spaces, including the pace and scale of city, can be imbricated
in the lifecourse, with Jarvis’ (2005) research on London life arguing
that the city itself become a force in people’s lives. For many lifecourse
researchers, the spatial contingencies of everyday life (home, school,
work, the street) are a way of situating or contextualising personal and
social experience; moreover, understanding how we gain meaning in
our lives from particular places adds depth to lifecourse research.
In Chapter Six, Bisola Falola uses ‘life-geohistories’ to explore
everyday spaces with young people, adding nuance to research on
lifecourse transitions. Her method combines life history interviews
with participatory mapping techniques as well as walking tours
(go-along interviews). This approach reveals how everyday places
are implicitly significant in shaping transitions to adulthood and the
15
experience of growing up. The knowledge generated by this method

is rich, as the research process encourages young people to reflect on
multiple dimensions of place while being immersed in places they are
familiar with. In Chapter Seven, Bree Akesson examines the value
of mapmaking for research with young children affected by political
violence in the occupied Palestinian territories. She carefully reflects
on the process of mapmaking as a way of empowering children’s
agency, validating their own knowledge about where they live, using an
approach that they feel comfortable with. Importantly, she underlines
the value and ethical responsibility of including young participants in
the analysis of the visual data, where maps facilitate opportunities for
discussion.
In Chapter Eight, Sophie Bowlby outlines her research on women’s
personal communities in midlife, investigating how participants ‘kept in
touch’ in both real and virtual spaces. The research connects lifecourse
trajectories to friendship networks through in-depth interviews and a
visual schematic of each participant’s close ties. A particular strength of
the chapter is its reflection on how the interviewer is implicated in the
research by being more or less empathetic to participants – exposing the
fallacy of the researcher as a neutral recorder of data. Using the work of
Bondi (2004), Bowlby argues that it is important to pay attention to our
own reactions in a research encounter, as well the impact of listening
to participants’ (sometimes painful) stories. In the final chapter in this
section, Kaisa Schmidt-Thomé discusses the use of ‘geobiographies’
and softGIS for lifecourse research, working at the spatial scale of the
body to think through how we engage with embodied knowledge
(Chapter Nine). Her aim is to move beyond methods that simply
capture the verbal, drawing on the work of Karjalainen (2003) to
think through how ‘meaningful events are spatially constituted’. She
connects life stories and geodata together using walking interviews (cf
Falola above), triangulating her participants’ experiences of everyday
outdoor places with a method that emphasises the physical experience
of being in a place.
Mobilities
The final part of the book considers lifecourse research that captures
experiences of mobility and migration. In particular, family migration
research is a growing interest in the social sciences, with many projects
taking an explicitly lifecourse approach (Geist and McMacus, 2008;
Kulu and Milewski, 2007). Moving, whether across town or migrating
internationally, often connects to a period of lifecourse transition.
16
Introduction
Moreover, lifecourse researchers have been interested in how lifecourse

position – childhood, adulthood, older age – influences the experience
of migration, with children travelling with parents, or young people
moving away from home to attend school, or older people moving in
retirement (Mortimer and Shanahan, 2004). Besides age at migration,
there is growing recognition of other intersecting social categories of
difference in lifecourse migration research, including sexuality (Lewis,
2014), ethnicity (Finney, 2011), social class (Kynsilehto, 2011) and
gender (McDowell, 2013a, 2013b). Recently, researchers have also
begun to consider the impact of immobility on the lifecourse, with
diverse research interested in bodily stillness during long commutes
(Bissell, 2014), to waiting to hear about asylum claims (Conlon, 2011).
The chapters in this final section examine how mobility connects to
work, leisure, family and belonging across the lifecourse.
In Chapter Ten, Jane Yeonjae Lee presents narratives of ‘1.5
generation’ Korean New Zealanders. Lee’s work combines narrative
interviews, analysis of participant’s personal web pages and blogs,
and her own research notes from participant observation at shared
social events. Besides considering how migration disrupts and also
creates new possibilities for ‘home’ over the lifecourse, her work also
considers the possibilities and ethical challenges of being an insider in
the research process. The chapter discusses how the project evolved
into a transnational ethnography, moving beyond sites of migration
to consider lifecourse data in its ‘fullest context’. The concept of
positionality is further examined by Anne Leonora Blaakilde (Chapter
Eleven), who details an ethnographic method for researching migration
at the end of the lifecourse. Her work aims to grasp the emotional
context – and sometimes awkward confusion of the research process
– using thick description to give a rounded account of one man’s
migration in retirement. Following Marks (2002), Blaakilde works
within a ‘haptic epistemology’, valuing data from all the senses to
develop a research process of embodied interaction where the research
process is one of co-construction. The depth of this approach is
somewhat unusual for lifecourse research on migration, and highlights
the possibilities of engaging with a wide understanding of what kind
of knowledge matters.
Moving outwards in scale from the sensing body, in Chapter Twelve,
Françoise Dureau, Matthieu Giroud and Christophe Imbert use a
quantitative event history approach to understand both residential
and daily mobility in France, moving beyond an often segmented
approach to spatial mobility. Their hybrid approach captures ‘multi-
local’ data across the lifecourse through the concept of ‘life-space
17
trajectories’. Dureau et al’s work illustrates the usefulness of typologies

for understanding different forms of mobility and multi-residence,
allowing large and complex datasets to be productively organised
to better understand both local housing markets and participants’
often circular mobility over time. Finally, Mellissa Kelly presents an
intersectional mixed methods approach for understanding onward
migration decisions in Chapter Thirteen. Her research design is
concerned with highly skilled migrants’ positions as both individual
and social, collecting biographical interview data and using descriptive
statistics around education, employment and housing to compare the
situations of onward migrants and those who stayed. Kelly’s work aims
to move beyond a split between macro (push and pull factors) and
micro (individual decisions) scales to encompass both structural and
agential factors in migration decisions over the lifecourse.
Note
1
www.newdynamics.group.shef.ac.uk/
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22
Part I
Time
TWO
Time and the lifecourse:

perspectives from qualitative
longitudinal research
Bren Neale
Introduction1
For groups, as well as for individuals, life itself means to
separate and to be re-united, to change form and condition,
to die and to be reborn. It is to act and to cease, to wait
and rest, and then to begin acting again but in a different
way. And there are always new thresholds to cross… (van
Gennep, 1960 [1909], p 189)
This quotation from an early ‘armchair’ anthropologist reflects much of

what is compelling about the study of the lifecourse – conceptualised
here as the flow of lives through time. Writing in the first decade of
the 20th century, van Gennep was one of the first scholars to use the
organising principle of the lifecourse to make sense of social practices
and processes. He sought to understand how the biological processes
of ageing – from birth to death – intersect with the biographical
unfolding of lives – from cradle to grave. The study of individual
biographies, or life journeys, is a central component of lifecourse
research (Chamberlayne et al, 2000). The focus may be on the dynamics
of specific ‘phases’ of the lifecourse (for example, youth, older life);
transitions between these phases, or from one status or circumstance
to another (for example, into and out of schooling, parenthood,
employment, poverty, ill health or crime); or the mechanisms which
trigger turning points or transitions. Longer term trajectories are no
less important: for example, the age trajectory through childhood
and adulthood into later life; the family trajectory through partnering
and parenting into grandparenting; or the work trajectory through
education and un/employment into retirement. The intertwining of
these varied trajectories and how they influence each other is a key
25
site for investigation. It is through the long sweep of a life over decades
that macro-historical processes come more clearly into focus, and the
cumulative influence of earlier life patterns on later life chances and
experiences can be more fully investigated and understood.
While individual biography is integral to lifecourse research, so too is
a concern with how lives unfold collectively (interactively, relationally),
and how individual and collective lives shape and, in turn, are shaped
by wider historical, structural, spatial and geo-political processes. How
lifecourse research is approached depends on how these domains of
experience are understood, and the relative priority accorded to them.
Conceptualising the lifecourse in terms of the flow of lives brings
to the fore another of its key features – it is essentially a temporal
process. That it involves studying lives over time (Elder and Giele,
2009) seems, at first glance, to be self evident and straightforward, a
matter of creating a moving picture that charts changes and reveals what
happens next. Yet trajectories, transitions and turning points do not
necessarily unfold in chronological order, in a linear direction or at a
uniform pace. Discerning how time is implicated in the unfolding of
lives is a challenge when much existing lifecourse research is empirically
driven and under theorised (Reiter et al, 2011).
The complexities of biography, collective biography, history and
time alluded to above have implications for researching the lifecourse.
Longitudinal surveys began to develop initially in the US and the
UK during the latter decades of the 20th century. Such studies are
quantitatively driven, yielding social trend data from large scale,
national samples. These are followed up at regular intervals, turning a
‘snapshot’ of social life into a ‘movie’ (Berthoud and Gershuny, 2000).
Qualitative longitudinal (QL) research, with its roots in oral history,
anthropology, ethnography and community studies, has a longer
history. Defined as qualitative enquiry that is conducted through
or in relation to time, QL research uses in-depth, situated enquiry,
and a combination of thematic, case history and temporal analysis to
discern how lives unfold. Designs are flexible and creative. Time can
be built in prospectively, retrospectively, or through a combination of
the two. Tracking may occur intensively, following samples through
particular transitions or policy interventions, or extensively, to chart
changes across the decades (Neale, forthcoming). In this chapter, ways
of conceptualising the lifecourse from a QL research perspective are
outlined. The chapter concludes with an exploration of the flows of
time in human experience, and suggests ways to ‘slice’ time in order
to enrich lifecourse research.
26
Time and qualitative longitudinal research
The flow of lives…

The lifecourse is a central organising principle of longitudinal enquiry,
both qualitative and quantitative. The focus is on the unfolding lives
of individuals and groups, of different ages, generations, statuses and
dependencies; their positions in the life span and their life chances and
experiences, relative to others; and the dynamics of these processes
through biographical and historical time. The lifecourse can be
investigated in a variety of ways, creating a diverse and amorphous
field of study, but two approaches are outlined here.
Theoretical approaches
In the first, the lifecourse is defined in macrodynamic terms as a

socially defined and institutionally regulated sequence of transitions
which are re-enforced by normative expectations (Heinz, 2009b). Life
is seen to unfold as a predictable passage through a number of fixed,
developmental stages relating to the institutions of family, schooling,
employment and so on:
There is a central life cycle theme … that underlies much

of this research. … [using] panel data to show directly how
people move from stage to stage. … The standard lifecourse
progressions are the regular and expected events of anyone’s
life. … We expect to marry and have children at a certain
age, to retire from our jobs at another. … It is possible to
show whether members of the sample move along the
expected trajectory from year to year. … Particular expected
events, and unexpected ones (eg. divorce, unemployment),
their incidence at particular ages, their prevalence across the
population … constitute the individual life chances of a
given state of society. (Berthoud and Gershuny, 2000, p 230)
Berthoud suggests eight life stages, ranging from dependent child to

old/infirm. This is one among many models of lifecourse development,
or of particular ‘stages’ within it (for example, the model of childhood
development posited by Piaget). Researchers vary in the degree to
which they present these as prescriptive models, and Berthoud avoids
being overly deterministic. Nevertheless, such models are assumed to
represent widespread patterns of behaviour and, in the process, they
acquire the status of normative benchmarks against which to measure
the actuality of people’s lives. In such accounts, the lifecourse is assumed
27
to have a universal linearity and a seeming objectivity that places it

outside and ‘above’ those whose lives are under study.
An alternative, microdynamic approach starts from the premise that
the lifecourse is socially constructed through lived experiences and
subjectivities, and the agency and social interactions of individuals
and groups. While recognising the structural constraints within which
all lives unfold, this approach foregrounds the subjective framing and
crafting of life journeys across time and place. Social constructionists,
from van Gennep onwards, have reflected this fluidity in their research.
For Harris (1987, pp 27–8) the lifecourse is ‘the negotiation of a
passage through an unpredictably changing environment’; while, for
Holstein and Gubrium:
[T]he lifecourse does not simply unfold before and around

us; rather we actively organise the flow, pattern and direction
of experience … as we navigate the social terrain of our
everyday lives. … The meaning of our existence is artfully
constructed, constantly emerging, yet circumstantially
shaped. … The construction of the lifecourse is always
ineluctably local. … Individuals never yield authorship
of realities to deterministic structural imperatives. (2000,
pp 182–4, p 210, p 32)
This more malleable, constructionist approach has been reinforced

through historical evidence that challenges standardised models of
development: childhood and old age, for example, are relatively recent
historical categories, emerging in response to wider demographic
and structural changes in Western societies. In contemporary life,
too, generational categories (from infancy to deep old age) are fluid
and shifting as people cross generational boundaries, and as lifecourse
categories expand or contract. As Hockey and James observe, ‘We
have to account for changes in the shape of the lifecourse itself: it is
not only individuals who change but the categories that they inhabit’
(2003, p 57). That there is nothing fixed about the way the life span
is conceptualised or categorised is also reinforced in cross cultural
perspective. While the life span is recognised in all societies, age and
generational categories are culturally defined and constructed (Holstein
and Gubrium, 2000). Similarly, social ageing is perceived in varied
ways, for example, as an ‘upward’ journey to venerable status, or a
‘downward’ journey to senility (Hockey and James, 2003).
28
Methodological approaches
Methods for studying the lifecourse reflect and reinforce the distinctions
outlined above. Heinz (2009a, p 422) suggests there are two contrasting
methodologies: ‘top down’, from social structure to individual agency,
and ‘bottom up’, from social action to larger social structures. The
‘top down’ approach is a defining feature of large scale longitudinal
survey and panel studies. Such studies have significant value in charting
broad social trends across extensive segments of the population and
with considerable historical reach (given sustained funding). Through
structured questions that are repeated at regular intervals, they measure
what changes, for whom, the extent and direction of change, where
changes occur and over what time periods. Much of the focus is on
the spells of time that individuals spend in particular states. To return
to Berthoud’s ‘movie’ metaphor, such studies create an epic movie, a
broad ‘surface’ picture of change over the generations, generated from
big ‘thin’ data (Neale and Flowerdew, 2003, emphasis added).
This broad canvas is highly valuable, but also entails limitations: ‘much
… lifecourse analysis does not analyse lives but presents the statistical
histories of cohorts’ (Neugarten, quoted in Heinz, 2009b, p 476).
The flat, ‘surface’ picture allows for an understanding of correlations
between lifecourse factors, for example, between family and
educational or poverty trajectories, but correlations cannot be used to
infer causality. For those working with large scale, ‘thin’ data, evidence
on the factors that shape lifecourse trajectories and the mechanisms
through which change occurs is acknowledged to be fragile, indicating
the inherent complexities of unravelling interactions between individual
and structural factors (Such and Walker, 2002, p 190).
Discerning these patterns requires a finer, qualitative lens, operating
in particular contexts of change. This ‘bottom up’ approach, a defining
feature of QL research, focuses on the intricacies of change and
continuity in localised settings, the factors that trigger change, the
processes by which change occurs, and the creativity of individuals
in shaping or accommodating to these processes. Like all qualitative
research, QL research is concerned with human subjectivity: the
meanings that events, circumstances and social processes have for those
who experience them, captured primarily through reflexive narratives
of the self. It is also centrally concerned with human agency – the
capacity to act, to interact, to make choices, to influence the shape of
one’s own life and the lives of others. Agency is a dynamic concept,
embodying action, process, change, continuity and endurance, and
bringing subjective understandings of causality to the fore. This, then,
29
is the up close and personal movie, following the twists and turns in the
individual story lines, exploring the interior logic of lives to discern
how change is created, lived and experienced (Neale and Flowerdew,
2003, emphasis added).
The capacity to discern the mechanisms that shape lifecourse
trajectories, and the causes and consequences of change in particular
contexts, gives this mode of research significant explanatory power.
While the large studies may reveal the wholesale movement of
populations from points A to B, the ‘thick’ dynamic data generated
through QL research reveals the triggers for such journeys, why they
are undertaken, and their varied nature along the way. Giele (2009,
p 236) makes a similar point: while ‘demographic surveys show the
magnitude and distribution of migration in entire populations … only
individual or family histories can reveal why one individual moves and
another stays put’.
The in-depth, situated nature of QL enquiry is integral to its strength,
but can be seen as a limitation in a scientific tradition that values ‘hard’
statistical evidence. It is the large scale panel and cohort studies that
have become established as the ‘gold standard’ research method, the
‘backbone’ of lifecourse enquiry (Elder and Giele, 2009). In 2003
Heinz noted that quantitative studies had made impressive progress in
exploring the shape of life trajectories through the use of event history
and sequence-pattern analysis. However:
Qualitative life history or biography research seems to

have made comparatively less visible progress. Though
it has been recognised as an important complement to
life event and trajectory studies … it has yet to become a
steady companion and resides at the margins of mainstream
lifecourse research. (Heinz, 2003, p 75)
This tendency to view QL studies as somewhat peripheral, of use only

to augment the large scale panel studies, is notably persistent:
The field of lifecourse studies has matured. There appears

to be more consensus on methods of data collection and
on analytical strategies … Longitudinal survey research
and panel studies are the principal way to chart changes
in the lifecourse over time, with other methods, such as
… ethnographic observation … as important supplements
(Elder and Giele, 2009, pp vii–viii)
30
Part of the reason for this perception, perhaps, is that these two research
paradigms have developed as parallel fields of enquiry, with little cross
referencing between the two (albeit their complementarity has never
been in doubt).
Bridging the gap
The need to bridge this gap between microdynamic and macrodynamic

approaches has long been recognised:
We cannot hope to understand society unless we have a

prior understanding of the relationship between biography
and history … [the task is to] continually work out and
revise your views on … the problems of social structure in
which biography and history intersect (Mills, 1959, p 225)
While Mills had little to say about how this relationship could be
investigated, researchers had already begun to explore the connections
via the ‘meso’ domain of experience. Here collectives of individuals,
in communities, families, organisations and generational cohorts,
provide a bridge between individual and structural processes (cf. the
concept of ‘linked lives’ (Elder and Giele, 2009) and Settersten and
Gannon’s (2009) model of ‘agency within structure’).QL researchers
have a long history of working in this tradition, following collectives
of individuals over time who share particular life circumstances
and/or whose fortunes are shaped by a common passage through a
changing historical landscape. In a rich variety of ways, these studies
bring collective biography and historical processes into a common
framework. Examples include Jahoda et al’s classic study of the effects
of long-term unemployment in Marienthal (1972 [1932]) and Pollard
and Filer’s study of the educational trajectories of primary school
children (1999).
Prospectively tracking or retrospectively sampling across generations
are important strategies for linking individual lives with wider historical
processes. Shah and Priestley’s (2011) study of three generations of
disabled people revealed very different experiences of growing up
through a shifting landscape of disability policies over many decades
of change. Similarly, Giele (2009) uses retrospective methods to chart
the changing environments shaping the career trajectories of three
generations of high achieving women.
If bridging the conceptual gap between structural and experiential
understandings of the lifecourse is a challenge, so too is bridging the
31
methodological gap between large and small scale studies. Here too,
some progress is being made. QL research has traditionally been equated
with in-depth, small scale studies, the product of individual or small
team scholarship. But recent developments have seen a ‘scaling up’ of
QL research in ways that can enhance the evidence base and combine
depth with breadth of data and analysis. Qualitative panel studies
(QPSs) are one example.2 These studies engage with larger and more
widespread samples, over longer timespans (for example, Burton et al’s
(2009) large scale longitudinal ethnography). In-depth QL studies need
not necessarily be ‘small scale’ in terms of sample size, geographical
coverage or historical reach. This scaling up process produces a new
kind of movie, intimate epics that are grounded in ‘big’ rich data and
evidence, yet, crucially, retain their depth and explanatory power.
Parallel developments and shifts are also evident in the macro field of
research. Medium scale community based panel surveys are developing
(for example, Born in Bradford) that are no longer driven by the
search for elusive, nationally representative samples (Rothman et al,
2013). Mixed longitudinal methodologies are being refined (Giele
and Elder, 1998; Heinz, 2003; Cohler and Hostetler, 2004), while
QPSs are increasingly designed to run alongside large surveys or form
a nested sample within. The conceptual and methodological advances
outlined above are relatively new developments but, taken together,
they suggest the rise of a new methodological infrastructure within
which lifecourse research can advance and flourish.
…through time
While lifecourse research is centrally concerned with the flow of lives,
the temporal dimensions of the enterprise, how lives flow through
time, have been neglected. Engaging with temporal theory, however,
is clearly important, for how the lifecourse is perceived depends, in
large measure, on how time itself is perceived:
To study the experience of duration, the estimation of an

interval ... or the timing, sequence and co-ordination of
behaviour, is to define time as duration, interval, passage,
horizon, sequencing and timing. The conceptualisation is
in turn imposed on the studies. .. Time does not ‘emerge’
from these studies but is predefined in the very aspects that
are being studied. (Adam, 1990, p 94)
32
Western notions of the ageing process are based on

fundamental assumptions about chronology. We organise
our temporal perceptions by connecting the past to the
present, and this to the future, in linear terms. … We
divide and mark our days with units of time, seemingly
orienting our every action to clock and calendar. Life
change and a linear chronology implicate one another. Our
understanding of ageing and life change is circumscribed
and propelled by our view of time passing – irresistibly,
irreversibly, irretrievably, inevitably. The linear, progressive
lifecourse is an artefact of this chronology. (Holstein and
Gubrium, 2000, pp 35–6)
A powerful critique of this dominant perception of time is offered

by Adam (1990). Her main arguments are summarised here. Most of
our social scientific and common sense assumptions about time are
reflected in clock and calendar time, which are linked to the regular
pattern of the seasons and the cycles of nature. This ‘fixed’ model of
time has its source in abstract, positivist, Newtonian physics and the
clear cut, reductionist dualisms of Cartesian logic. Time is perceived
as an invariant, chronological, linear feature of life, a quantity that
is objective and measurable, with a relentless, regular and recurrent
motion that is expressed numerically. Paradoxically, ‘fixed’ time has two
intertwined dimensions: it is inexorably advancing and irreversible, yet
recurs in repetitive cycles (in much the same way that the lifecourse
itself is perceived). Past and future are separate and identical realms, held
apart by the progression of the clock. Time in this formulation provides
an external structure within which our lives are measured, planned,
organised and regulated. In the process time becomes a resource, a
commodity and a site of power and control. Under ‘clock’ time, then,
lives progress and events occur ‘in time’, for time is external to them. It
is a shared background, a taken for granted presence, the constant and
unvarying medium through which lives are lived and events unfold.
While this view of time is a recent social construction within Western
industrial societies, it is pervasive and of global significance, making it
difficult to think beyond or outside it. Time is so extensively embedded
in the mechanics of the clock and calendar, that the clock becomes
time. Yet this model has its source in outmoded forms of scientific
explanation and logic. Newtonian physics has been superseded by
theories of relativity, quantum physics and ecological biology. Drawing
on these insights, Adam (1990) offers a powerful way to rethink and
transcend clock time, turning our common sense notions of time on
33
their head to consider not events in time, but time in events. In this
qualitative, experiential formulation, time is not fixed but ‘fluid’,
rhythmically and perpetually emerging in multi-dimensional ways in
varied local contexts. Objective, constant, one-dimensional clock time
gives way to a plurality of times, held in a simultaneous relationship
with each other, flowing and intersecting in complex and unpredictable
ways. This, for Adam, is temporality, a realm where flows of time are
embedded within our day to day lives. These flows and rhythms are
relative, subjectively defined and context dependent. They inhere in
and emerge from our social events and practices. Rather than occurring
in time, these processes constitute time.
In this fluid, temporal realm, past and future are no longer separate
states that progress chronologically, in a linear direction; they are
processes that flow into one another. Relativity theory demonstrates
that time is curved, circular rather than linear, unfolding in a recursive
(self referential) loop, such that before and after lose their meaning.
Since time folds back on itself, the past is no more fixed than the
future. A similar transformation occurs in our social understanding
of causality. In clock time, causal sequences are implied in the linear,
orderly progression from past to future; cause and effect are intimately
tied to this sense of chronology. However, in the fluid realm of
temporality, causality is integral to the world of experience. It emerges
as a subjective, ongoing and emergent process, bound up with ever
recurring, and widening cycles of influence, each embodying subtle
changes that cumulate slowly and almost imperceptibly as they ripple
outwards. While causality can only be discerned by looking backwards,
reconstructing past lives from the vantage point of the present, it no
longer becomes tenable to trace outcomes back to a single, objectively
defined cause.
Adam (1990) shows that unpredictable, intersecting flows of time are
not confined to the social world but permeate the natural and cosmic
worlds. This is where our temporal awareness arises, for temporality is
a law of nature, of which our social world is a part. She demonstrates
that ‘fluid’ time predates clock time and is no less pervasive in social
experience. It is an enduring feature of all societies, both modern and
traditional. To take one example, while past and future extensions are
fundamental to all cultures these find expression in highly varied ways.
The Balinese calendar does not measure the passage of chronological
time but marks and classifies noteworthy social and natural events
(Holstein and Gubrium, 2000). Rather than indicating what date it is,
this calendar indicates what kind of time it is. In many other cultures,
too, people do not order events so much as name them, with little
34
sense of clock based history, chronological aging, or the cumulative

effects of past, present and future. As Holstein and Gubrium observe,
‘the linear lifecourse is merely one variant. … across cultures we find
depictions of ageing and life change aligning with local notions of
time’ (2000, p 36).
In contrasting ‘fixed’ and ‘fluid’ time, Adam (1990) is careful to
avoid creating another Cartesian duality. She stresses that these are not
either/or formulations: both need to be taken into account as empirical
realities that influence every day existence. Even so, in the broader,
more fluid formulation offered by Adam, narrowly conceived clock
time loses its dominance. It becomes one among many complex flows
of time that make up our temporal world. The key task then becomes
a holistic one: to transcend the dualities that stultify conventional
investigations of time, to discern and investigate the flows and rhythms
of time – social and natural, linear and cyclical, ancient and modern,
quantitative and qualitative, fixed and fluid; and, crucially, to explore
the webs of their intrinsic connections, how they are implicated in
each other.
Two decades on, some progress has been made to import these
insights into social scientific thinking although, inevitably, clock time
continues to dominate social research, both qualitative and quantitative.
In the large scale panel studies, time is a self evident, empirical
dimension of research. A moving, chronological picture of progressions
from ‘stage’ to ‘stage’ emerges through the simple expedient of building
calendar time in as the medium for conducting a study. Indeed, this
strategy is used in all longitudinal enquiry. But QL research is also
centrally concerned with flows of time. Temporality is factored into the
design and development of a QL enquiry from the outset, not only (or
necessarily) as a methodological strategy, the medium through which
data are gathered, but as a rich theoretical construct, and a topic of
enquiry that drives data generation and analysis.
Time can be ‘sliced’ along a variety of dimensions to build theory
and aid investigation. Five possible dimensions are outlined here.
Past–present–future: the passage of time

While life trajectories can be understood through fixed chronology, it is
also necessary to understand the fluidity of past and future – how they
are constructed and reconstructed through the ever shifting present.
Past-present-future may be understood at a macro level (re-interpreting
history) as well as a micro level (overwriting biographies). From a
micro perspective, the past – hindsight, memory, heritage, legacies,
35
reputations – can be seen as a subjective resource that plays an important

role in life planning and the ongoing construction of social identities.
The future, meanwhile, is a neglected field of research, yet it has the
potential to reveal the seeds of change (Adam and Groves, 2007).
Recursive understandings of time emerge through a combination of
prospective and retrospective methods. Using life history methods
and tools such as time maps, accounts of past and future time can be
generated, revisited and re-envisioned at each research encounter. This
is a powerful way to understand the future orientations and changing
aspirations of individuals, and the opportunities and constraints that
shape their life trajectories and chances.
Micro–meso–macro: the magnitude of time
This dimension captures the different magnitudes of biography,

collective biography and history, and their complex intersections. As
shown above, historical moments or the broader sweep of macro-
history can be discerned even within the confines of a time limited
study, through a creative combination of prospective and retrospective
methods, and through cross generational designs. As a further example,
Bornat and Bytheway (2010), in their study of the Oldest Generation,
combined life history and diary methods to capture the long sweep
of a life lived over decades, alongside the day to day contingencies
of older age. Bringing these different magnitudes of time together
enriched their analysis.
Intensive–extensive: the tempo of time
This dimension concerns the experiential intensity of our lives:

the tenor, pace, velocity and rhythms of time and the acuteness or
chronicity of change. This enables a focus on the pace and speed at
which events or change occur and time is perceived to pass – whether
it is slowing down or speeding up. Understanding these different
tempos and how they intersect is an important dimension of lifecourse
research. Studies of time use, or work–life balance, for example, may
distinguish between industrial time (the rigid, impersonal tempo of the
clock), and family time (which is fluid, flexible, enduring and value
laden), exploring how families attempt to reconcile these different
tempos (Harden et al, 2012). This dimension invites us to consider
continuities as well as change. The work of enduring hardship or
sustaining relationships – how, in all kinds of activity, people bide their
time, is equally important to our understanding of the flow of lives.
36
Continuities–discontinuities: the synchronicity of time
The extent to which time is perceived to be continuous or discontinuous

was first raised by Aristotle (Bastian, 2014). Synchronicity may
be understood in two senses. Biographically, it concerns how far
individuals feel ‘in step’ or ‘out of step’ with the dominant flows of
time in a society or community (Bastian, 2014). Discontinuities can
arise when there is a rupture in life experiences, whether planned
or welcomed, or not, for example, through migration or the entry
into parenthood, unemployment or divorce. For those undergoing
challenging transitions (illness, bereavement, poverty), time may
seem to shrink, creating a sense of being ‘out of time’, disoriented
or dislocated from the mainstream, such that the seamless flow of life
from past to future is disrupted. People commonly talk of ‘taking each
day as it comes’ or ‘living in the moment’. Shortened time horizons,
a sense of time as fleeting or ephemeral, can make future planning
impossible and multiply risks. This is the sense of liminality discerned
by van Gennep. Where it persists, this has implications for people’s
trajectories and life chances. This was powerfully documented by
Johoda et al (1972 [1932]) in their study of long-term unemployment
in Marienthal; in this context, quantitative measures of time were
meaningless. Synchronicity may also be understood in terms of the
timing of life events, and how these mesh across micro and macro time.
For example, the age, career and family stage reached by individuals
during the Great Depression in the US had a significant impact on
their ability to cope with adversity (Elder and Giele, 2009). Timing,
how biographical time intersects with wider historical time, is crucial
to our understanding of the flow of lives.
Time–space: the geographies of time
This dimension concerns the intrinsic connection between time and space
– or when and where – as a key mechanism to locate and contextualise
experiences and events. One of the ways that time is constituted and
made tangible is through its intersection with spatial markers, particularly
liminal places where we meet to reflect on our lives and finitude (Bakhtin,
1981 [1938]; May and Thrift, 2001). ‘When’ and ‘where’ can be added
to our understandings of ‘how’ and ‘why’ to further enrich the meaning
of social processes. While time–space is pervasive in life experiences and
processes, across the micro–macro spectrum it offers particular scope for
the development of temporal geographies, for comparative temporal
research, and for the study of borders, boundaries and spatial transitions.
37
The five temporal dimensions outlined above form a provisional

basis for elaborating the intricacies of time and their complex
intersections. Past, present and future, for example, can be understood
at different levels of magnitude – biographically or historically, in
different spatial contexts, and through differential experiences of the
intensity or synchronicity of time. Endless possibilities exist for further
refinement and for discerning myriad connections across and beyond
these dimensions. Adam (1990) reminds us that, in focusing on one
dimension of time, we should not lose sight of the others; as parts of
a larger whole, they are all implicated in how lives unfold.
Concluding comments
The chapter has sought to rethink our conceptualisations of the
lifecourse and to bring lived experiences and complex flows of time
more centrally into the picture. Time is central to the task of creating
a moving picture of the lifecourse; it is the lynchpin through which
to understand the relationship between agency and structure, and
between the social and biological dimensions of life journeys. Since
these relationships are essentially dynamic, in perpetual interplay as
lives unfold, it is only through time that we can begin to grasp how
agency and structure, micro and macro, the personal and social, and
indeed, the natural worlds are interconnected, and how they come
to be transformed (Neale and Flowerdew, 2003).
A focus on time in lifecourse research is crucial. But how time
is understood, its nature and parameters, is no less so. Our vision
will be impoverished if it is fixed solely on the clock and calendar.
Re-theorising the lifecourse by importing ideas from time theorists
is necessary if we are to discern time in a broader, more fluid way,
and thereby, to understand how it is experientially implicated in the
flow of lives. QL research is particularly suited to this enterprise, for
it brings lived experiences and flows of time into a common frame of
reference. Adam (1990) observes that seeing things through the lens
of time quite simply changes everything. This chapter suggests that
seeing things qualitatively through the lens of time produces a richness of
understanding that can greatly enhance our vision of the social world.
Notes
1
The ideas presented in this chapter were developed during the ESRC funded
‘Timescapes’ programme (2007–12, www.timescapes.leeds.ac.uk ). This programme
of research was designed to advance and scale up Qualitative Longitudinal research
through a national network of projects concerned with the dynamics of family life.
38
I am grateful to my Timescapes colleagues for many fruitful discussions on this

methodology, and to Barbara Adam, whose contributions to the programme enriched
our understandings of time.
2
The Timescapes study (see Note 1) is another example of ‘scaling up’ – bringing
thematically related studies together for a synthesis of evidence and secondary analysis
of datasets.
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Adam, B. and Groves, C. (2007) Future matters: Action, knowledge, ethics,
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Chamberlayne, P., Bornat, J. and Wengraf, T. (eds) (2000) The turn to
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Giele, J. (2009) ‘Life stories to understand diversity: Variations by class,
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Hockey, J. and James, A. (2003) Social identities across the life course,
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and Kegan Paul.
41
THREE
Time in mixed methods longitudinal

research: working across written
narratives and large scale panel
survey data to investigate attitudes
to volunteering
Rose Lindsey, Elizabeth Metcalfe and Rosalind Edwards
Introduction
The aim of this chapter is to explore the methodological and analytical
challenges thrown up by an ongoing study that has been reusing and
combining longitudinal qualitative narrative and quantitative survey
data to research individual attitudes to voluntarism between 1981 and
2012.1 This period represents a time of economic and social policy
change encompassing recession and cuts to public services; followed
by relative prosperity and increase in investment in public services; and
then the most recent recession and accompanying austerity measures
(Timmins, 2001; Glennerster, 2007; Alcock 2011; Defty, 2011; Driver,
2008).
Our study is part of a general move to promote secondary data
analysis in the UK, led by the major social science funding body,
the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Secondary
analysis involves the reuse of the rich infrastructure of pre-existing
social survey, interview, documents, administrative and other data
that have been generated by primary researchers or various agencies,
and which then are made available to secondary researchers through
archiving services. Our particular project reused both qualitative and
quantitative longitudinal datasets following individuals participating
in these panels through time, to enable us to identify changes and
continuities in volunteering attitudes and behaviours as these people
moved through the portion of their lifecourse under study. However,
the reuse of qualitative and quantitative data, and mixing methods are
not straightforward processes, and are subject to considerable debate
43
about how these may be achieved, and their relative strengths and
drawbacks, as we discuss in this chapter. Notably there is the knotty
issue of the basis on which these methods may be ‘mixed’ together.
The endeavour becomes even more complicated when the research
topic is concerned with time and the various data sets are longitudinal.
In turn, this raises issues about the nature of the conceptions of time
that are invoked within the datasets. In considering these complex,
interlinked issues, we aim to highlight and contribute to understandings
of time in lifecourse research.
The chapter is divided into three sections. The first considers our
reuse of selected narrative and survey datasets, their relationship with
time, and how we have accounted for this when engaging with them.
The second examines how we have analysed the longitudinal data
produced by writers and gathered from survey respondents and how
we have mixed these analyses. The final section explores what we have
learnt about mixing methods in a project where the data and analyses
are shaped by time.
Designing our study

A mixed methods study has particular strengths for research setting out
to trace individual volunteering attitudes and behaviours from the early
1980s to the present day. Quantitative analysis provides an overview of
individual attitudes and behaviours, but can struggle to explain why
individuals hold certain views or behave in a certain way. Qualitative
analysis provides depth and nuance which can explain why individuals
act in a certain way, or hold particular viewpoints, but it cannot and
does not claim representativeness of its findings. Our research design
aimed to potentially ‘offset’ the respective weaknesses of these two
analytical methodologies by taking advantage of their joint strengths
to provide a ‘complete[ness]’, and ‘comprehensive’ picture (Bryman,
2008, p 91) of volunteering behaviours and attitudes to voluntarism.
The methods, processes and terminologies involved in bringing
mixed methods together are still being debated (for example, Hesse-
Biber, 2010; Cameron, 2011; Leech, 2013). Of particular relevance
to us in this discussion are questions concerning the basis on which
qualitative and quantitative are compatible and able to be mixed. Is one
a facilitator of the other or are both approaches given equal emphasis?
Are they corroborative or contradictory, complementary or integral?
Does one enhance, extend or develop the other, or are they on a par?
And in what order should the methods be carried out, one after the
other or at the same time?
44
Mixed methods longitudinal research
When designing this project we avoided the notion of integration,

which implies an illuminative moment when consistent findings across
datasets form a perfect fit and merge into one. Rather, we preferred to
conceptualise the process as bringing the analyses of our quantitative
and qualitative datasets into dialogue with each other while working
on these analyses concurrently. We saw the datasets as complementary,
contributing knowledge towards different aspects of the substantive
research. We aimed for three types of mixed method dialogue:
1. across the lifetime of the project, described by Teddlie and

Tashakkori (2008, p 104) as a ‘continuous feedback loop’, to enable
an iterative research process;
2. some direct comparisons between qualitative and quantitative

analyses where there was a fit between the data;
3. combining substantive findings so that the sum of our joint

knowledge claims would be greater than our individual findings.
Crucial to the success of this process of dialogue and feedback was

the selection of a complementary combination of qualitative and
quantitative longitudinal datasets.
Qualitative and quantitative datasets used
The secondary datasets that we chose to reuse – a longitudinal writing

panel and cross-sectional and longitudinal panel survey data – were
generated so that they could be used for a variety of different research
purposes. As we describe below, given the broad potential uses of these
datasets, this has affected how we were able to apply these datasets to
the substantive aims of our mixed methods study. The longitudinal
qualitative data that we chose to use is the Mass Observation Project
(MOP),2 which we regarded as our ‘lead’ data source. Since 1981, a
national panel of self-selected volunteers has written for the MOP
in response to themed questions or ‘directives’ that are sent to them
three times a year. Over three decades, MOP writers have been asked
to discuss a range of issues relating to UK society and their personal
and political attitudes, involving past memories, current experiences
and future expectations. Although most MOP writers answer the
questions asked of them, their narrative scripts often stray from the
theme and go ‘off piste’ (in our judgement). The results can be both
frustrating and deeply rewarding to the researcher. MOP writing
represents a rich source of insight into the changes and continuities in
people’s lives during the time in which they have written for MOP.
45
It also represents a unique source of longitudinal data; yet, to date, in

following individual writers across time, this is the first research project
to use the MOP as a longitudinal data source, rather than a thematic
cross-sectional source.
On the quantitative longitudinal side, we chose two datasets to
provide facilitating, contextual insights into volunteering (see Table
3.1). The first, the British Social Attitudes survey (BSAS) is a cross-
sectional survey conducted annually since 1983. More than 3,000
people aged 18+, who are representative of the British population are
chosen at random to take part. The BSAS measures continuity and
change in people’s attitudes about ‘what it is like to live in Britain and
how they think Britain is run’.3
The second, the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) was a
multi-purpose panel survey that collected longitudinal information
from the same 5,500 households, comprising 10,300 individuals aged
16+, between 1991 and 2008.4 It was replaced by another survey
Understanding Society (US) in 2011. Over 80% of the BHPS panel
continued to participate in US. Although there is some variation in
the questions asked between them, when analysed together the two
surveys constitute one longitudinal panel survey. The overall aim of
the BHPS/US is to understand social and economic change in Britain.
Thus, as Table 3.1 shows and we describe below, these three datasets
complement each other, temporally and thematically.
Table 3.1 Qualitative and quantitative data fit

Longitudinal data sources Cross-sectional data sources

MOP BHPS (1991 to BSAS volunteering BSAS views

Directives 2008) and US questions on welfare
(2011) questions and political
responsibility
Wave 1: 20 older, 2,267 people The number of people responding and

serial responding who volunteered their age range varied by year. Mean age
writers at least once category 45 to 54, mean (sd) responders
between 1996 in a year: 3,392.8 (711.7)
Wave 2: 18 and 2011, aged

younger writers, between 15 and
lower response 85 in 1996
rate
2012 Volunteering; the
Big Society
2011 Volunteering Views

behaviours
2010 Work; Belonging; Views

Survey
46
Longitudinal data sources Cross-sectional data sources

2009 Views

2008 Economic crisis Volunteering Volunteering Views
behaviours behaviours
2007
Views

2006 Core British Values Volunteering Views
behaviours
2005 Views

2004 Being part of Volunteering Views
research behaviours
2003 Views


behaviours
2001 Views

2000 Volunteering Volunteering Views

1999 Views

1998 Volunteering Volunteering Views

1997 Paid work Views

1996 Unpaid work/ Volunteering Volunteering Views
Volunteering behaviours attitudes
1995 Where you live: Views
community
1994 Views


attitudes
1992

1991 BHPS begins Views

1990 Voluntary Orgs/ Views
Social
1989 Divisions Views
1988

1987 Views

1986 Views

1985 Views

1984 Relatives, friends, Views
neighbours
1983 Work BSAS begins Views
1982

1981 Unemployment
47
How the datasets fit together
The three secondary datasets chosen for this study were not designed
specifically for researching volunteering, but as Table 3.1 shows, all
three contain questions on volunteering. When selecting these datasets
we attempted to find the best temporal and thematic fit to answer our
research questions. However, despite this attention to fit, temporal and
thematic gaps run through and across the datasets used. The MOP
contains 15 directives with themes relevant to the substantive aims
of our project: volunteering, helping out informally, membership of
organisations, work, unpaid work, and voluntarism and the role of
the state. These specific foci meant that the directives we planned to
work with were not evenly spread across the timeframe. As Table 3.1
shows, there is some temporal bunching of our selected directives.
We were concerned that these gaps in time would result in us missing
reports of key events and changes in individual writers’ lifecourses, their
volunteering behaviour, their attitudes towards voluntarism and the
state, and their experience of events such as recession, public unrest and
changes to social policy. We believed, however, that these limitations
were overridden by the contribution of the sampled directives to the
substantive aims of the project.
The 1996 directive, entitled ‘Unpaid work’, which asks writers for
accounts of their volunteering behaviour and their views on the role
of voluntarism in society, is key in bringing MOP data, and BSAS and
BHPS sources into dialogue. In particular, the questions asked by this
directive fit well with those about volunteering attitudes in the BSAS
and volunteering behaviour in the BHPS, in 1996. As Table 3.1 shows,
both the BHPS and the BSAS have thematic and temporal gaps in their
questions on volunteering. The BHPS did not begin asking questions
about volunteering until 1996, and then did so only on alternate years.
Furthermore, the questions asked are not able to provide insight into
the individual attitudes towards voluntarism and the welfare state that
are of interest to our project. To some extent these gaps are filled by the
BSAS data set providing snapshots of annual changes in attitudes and
behaviour. There are two drawbacks, however. First, the BSAS survey
only asked questions about volunteering behaviour in 1998, 2000, and
2008, and its questions on volunteering attitudes only began in 1993
(see Table 3.1). Second, the same respondents are not used every year,
meaning it is not possible to measure longitudinal, individual change
or continuity in attitudes or behaviours. Thus there are difficulties
in relating the BSAS directly to either the BHPS or the MOP data.
48
At the design stage we had concerns about the individual limitations

of these two quantitative datasets. However, we believed that these
would be mitigated by the strength of our mixed method study which
would allow us to combine the breadth of an extensive quantitative
perspective with the depth of intensive qualitative approach, offering
original substantive and methodological insights. We discuss the value
of this endeavour later in this chapter when we examine our analyses
and our knowledge claims.
Using our datasets: how the design worked in practice
Sampling
Our sampling strategy sought to take advantage of the respective and

distinct strengths of each of our selected data sets for our project’s
substantive concerns. This process was not always smooth. The
challenges related not just to ensuring strategic and useful sampling
within each dataset, but ensuring that these choices enabled dialogue
across the qualitative and quantitative data.
Our primary criterion for the MOP study was writer response
rates for our chosen directives. We identified individuals who had
contributed to all 15 directives, then those who had responded to 14
out of 15, then 13 and so on. This yielded a cohort of 20 serially-
responding-writers, 14 women and 6 men. The majority are now
in retirement, and began writing for MOP in their mid-30s or
later. While these people are not representative of the broader UK
population in terms of age, gender and status (Lindsey and Bulloch,
2014), this was offset by our ability to compare them with BHPS and
BSAS respondents who are representative, to identify similarities or
differences between the samples; and to compare MOP respondents
with those who match them in age and volunteering behaviour in
the BHPS and BSAS.
This first cohort of MOP writers provided older voices that could
offer insights into the volunteering lives of individuals as they moved
from a midpoint (or further) in their working and family lifecourse
into retirement. But we were concerned that our MOP sample
selection would not allow us to explore, fully, discourses around civic
engagement at different stages in the lifecourse. So we decided to
sample a second group of 20 writers with good response rates from a
younger mixed-gender cohort who would provide voices at an earlier
stage of their working and family lifecourse. The pool of writers
available comprised a mix of people who had written between 1981
49
and 1996, or 1996 and 2012. We also wanted to select people with a
mix of occupations, as a very loose indicator of class and educational
background. However, this yielded less youthful individuals than we
had hoped. Most writers in our second cohort were 30 or older at the
time that they started writing, leaving us with a shortage of voices of
individuals in their twenties. The eventual second cohort amounted
to 18 individuals, 5 men and 13 women.5
Sampling of the BSAS survey was a more straightforward process; we
were able to use the entire representative sample. However, sampling
of the BHPS/US was more complex. Two different sample options
were possible. The first consisted of the entire sample. Unfortunately,
not all of the respondents have taken part in the panel every year so
we were unable to follow these individuals through time. Instead we
had to take a cross-sectional approach, treating each year as a snapshot
of volunteering behaviour.
The second sample option was specific: people who had volunteered
between 1996 and 2011. This allowed exploration of how people
transition in and out of volunteering over time, and potentially some
associated lifecourse events. To reduce the impact of missing responses
within the dataset, we sampled individuals who had responded to
the volunteering question every year between 1996 and 2011 (serial
responders), and who stated that they had volunteered at least once
between 1996 and 2011 (serial volunteers). This serial responding
sample also had strong similarities with the MOP volunteer writers,
meaning that these two sources were compatible, enabling some direct
comparisons to be made between quantitative and qualitative material
within this particular timeframe. By combining and comparing these
secondary data, we hoped to overcome some of their individual
weaknesses, and add to our substantive and methodological knowledge
base.
Reflections on data fit
The process of sampling and fitting our reused datasets together has
not been smooth or seamless. The temporal and substantive ‘messiness’
(Law, 2007) of data originally collected for a different set of research
aims has presented the primary challenge to data fit. Yet, although
individually messy, when used in dialogue with other data, each
dataset has much to contribute to the study, offering longitudinal and
substantive complementarity and comparison.
50
Analysing data produced by writers and survey

respondents across time
In this section we move on to explore our experiences of working
with the strengths and limitations of these secondary qualitative and
quantitative datasets. We note how the original methods of collecting
and producing the datasets shaped our data temporally, and shaped the
way in which we have gone about our longitudinal analyses. This has
imposed limitations on our analyses, enabling less direct comparison
of the quantitative and qualitative data than we anticipated. However,
the process of bringing qualitative and quantitative data together has
demonstrated the methodological strengths of attempting a dialogue.
Mixing methods and reusing longitudinal data has also challenged
us, as researchers, to reflect on how we have engaged with time in
our research project, and how we can communicate our different
methodological conceptualisations of time within a mixed method
research environment.
Research instruments for collecting data
The research instruments for our secondary data were designed by other
primary researchers, and thus were not a perfect fit with our research
questions. In the case of the BHPS/US and the BSAS surveys, these
were structured questionnaires that were conducted verbally face-
to-face, or over the telephone. In the case of the MOP, the research
instruments were directives generated by the archivists or commissioned
by researchers for specific research projects. These quantitative and
qualitative research instruments were used consecutively across the ‘real’
timeframe of 1981 to 2012, a linear longitudinal movement visualised
in Table 3.1, which we have conceptualised as ‘vertical time’.
Both types of research instrument have produced responses that
occur in the individuals’ ‘now’, a form of present time that immediately
becomes a point in the past. The questions fielded required respondents
to loop backwards and forwards through time from their ‘now’ to their
past and future. As researchers, we have also had to move mentally
across these timeframes in order to make sense of the responses. We
have conceptualised this respondent and researcher movement as
‘horizontal time’.
51
The quantitative story
The designers of the BSAS questionnaire aimed to generate responses

from survey participants that could be measured quantitatively and
cross-sectionally. The designers of the BHPS/US questionnaire
aimed to produce responses that could be measured quantitatively,
longitudinally and cross-sectionally. The temporal questions that were
put to survey participants were relatively uncomplicated, and when
responding they moved through simple ‘horizontal time’, usually the
recent past (the last year), the ‘now’, the planned future, and sometimes
a vague imagined future. In this context, recall of the recent past can
be flawed (Lugtig and Jäckle, 2014). When asked to describe their
experiences over the previous year participants can misjudge the length
of time involved without the aid of a diary or mental landmarks to guide
them through the recent past. The point in the day, week and year in
which the survey was conducted can influence the responses of the
participant (Tumen and Zeydanli, 2013). The rapport and relationship
built between participant and interviewer, variations in how interviews
were conducted, and alternatives to interviews, such as telephone
or by proxy when interviews were not possible, can also affect the
accuracy of responses (Lynn et al, 2004). These process provisos are
not immediately accessible to the secondary analysts using this type of
data. In contrast, they are very evident in the MOP data, which have
provided insight into their possible effects within the quantitative data.
When analysing the BHPS/US longitudinal data for this study,
participants’ responses provided a wealth of retrievable, representative,
demographic data across a series of consecutive individual ‘nows’.
However, the absence of volunteering questions prior to 1996 meant
that we were only able to look at the timeframe 1996–2011, a 15-year
period that represents half the portion of lifecourse being analysed in
the qualitative data. To illustrate, if a BHPS serial responder, whom
we will call Sarah, volunteered every year between 1985 and 1995, but
stopped volunteering in 1995, we would have no knowledge of Sarah’s
volunteering. Hence we would have no reason to think of Sarah as a
recently-stopped serial volunteer. Instead Sarah would be perceived
as a non-volunteer after 1996, and would not be considered within
our 1996–2011 sample. Although we cannot directly compare Sarah
with our sample of MOP writers, our MOP sample can tell us that
people like Sarah exist.
The individuals who comprised the longitudinal sample we used from
the BHPS/US were all serial responding, serial volunteers between
1996 and 2011. They represent a cohort of individuals, of various
52
ages, who have grown older as they moved through ‘real’ longitudinal
time. Their experience of ageing may be unique to this chronological
timeframe. Although we are able to describe their reported attitudes,
behaviours, and demographic characteristics over time, we cannot be
certain why any changes or continuities in their attitudes or behaviour
have taken place. These may have been associated with the process of
moving through the lifecourse, but equally or additionally they may
have related to other influences, such as the economic, political and
social policy environment of the time. In this quantitative sample,
time, age, lifecourse, and external events are entangled and connected,
reducing the accuracy with which we can extrapolate the experiences
of this cohort to similar BHPS/US cohorts in other chronological
timeframes. Again, the MOP data has been able to provide us with
analyses and insights that the BHPS/US data cannot offer. For example,
MOP writers have described changes in their capacity to volunteer,
and related this to the complexity of their ageing experience, discussing
transitions in health, mobility and energy.
Individually the BHPS/US and the BSAS analyses offer limited
evidence relating to voluntarism and volunteering attitudes and
behaviours across, and at particular points in, time. When used in
dialogue with the MOP data, the quantitative analyses offer some
corroboration of and comparison with the MOP material. However, in
the most part, what they offer is a different type of descriptive insight.
Driven by the representative nature of the survey participants, these
analyses illuminate the different dynamic demographics of those taking
part in volunteering over time.
The qualitative story
Our longitudinal qualitative analytical approach was to treat each writer

as a single entity evolving through vertical time. We conceptualised each
response to a directive as a freeze frame of a lifecourse, and the combined
responses of a writer as an evolving narrative of that lifecourse. In this
way we sought to contextualise reported attitudes towards voluntarism
and volunteering behaviours. Within this conceptual framework we
anticipated that ‘the now’ would play a large part in our analyses,
allowing both complementarity, and direct comparison with the
BHPS/US and BSAS responses from 1993 onwards.
However, the questions put to MOP writers by the directives were
far more temporally intricate than those put to the survey participants.
Writers were encouraged to move through a range of time states, tenses
and identities, from the retrospective private or collective past, to the
53
imagined personal or collective future. This required us, as researchers,

to track the ideas and thoughts written in these different horizontal
time states through the ‘real’ vertical time of each consecutive response
to a directive. This complex, superfluid MOP time could not be
immediately compared with the BHPS/US data, and the qualitative
data required synthesising and interpretation before bringing it into
dialogue with the quantitative material to provide comparison and
complementarity.
Writing in ‘the now’ was not always reliable. When respondents
were experiencing some sort of personal rupture or transition in their
lives – such as divorce, bereavement, unemployment, sharp loss of
income or a health problem – this was often elided during the time
in which this was taking place, even when relevant to the directive
theme being discussed. These elisions may stem from the inability of
narrators to make immediate sense of these events and how they fit
into their ‘nows’ and constructed identities and life stories. When a
rupture is finally discussed by the narrator the effect is palimpsestic.
Previous ‘scripts’ are overwritten, and the new event is presented with
hindsight as ‘the past’ and absorbed into the life story. This phenomenon
affected our analytical approach, in that we placed increasing value on
retrospective recall. However, we noted that retrospective recall also has
its limitations. Some narratives can be contradictory, and occasionally
writers have refocused or reframed the past when examining it through
a different lens, or in the light of recent events (Neale and Flowerdew,
2003; Lindsey, 2004).
We settled on an approach that combined analysis of ‘the now’
with retrospective accounts to construct vertical personal, work,
volunteering and attitudinal lifecourse histories/biographies for each
writer. Contextualising voluntarism, volunteering, and attitudes
towards the welfare state within these lifecourses,6 we looked for
continuity and change in individual writers, and differences and
similarities between writers. We were able to identify various complex
volunteering trajectories associated with the lifecourses of the MOP
writers sampled. However, few writers actually related their personal
and volunteering experiences to external events such as recession and
increased unemployment. This narrative gap may be associated with
the secondary nature of the data, as the research instruments do not
explicitly prompt such connections. But it also raises some interesting
questions about how individuals make sense of the public and the
private when constructing narratives and stories about their lives.
We also sought to explore the longitudinal shape of volunteering
trajectories in our concurrent quantitative analyses. This process
54
was hampered by the limited timeframe of the available sample

(1996–2011). Although the quantitative analyses were able to offer
some cautious insights into relationships between some key life events
and volunteering behaviour during this time, they were not able to
provide a full understanding of the relationship between the lifecourse
and volunteering. Thus, when describing volunteering trajectories,
the quantitative analyses could only provide evidence for two types
of behaviour within the British population: episodic or continuous
volunteers. However, the quantitative analyses were able to make some
associations between volunteering and recession, and provide detail on
who volunteers across time, a question that the MOP data was unable
to answer, given the limited size of the sample.
Reflections on mixed method analytical fit
Reflecting and evaluating on how we have met the original aims

relating to mixing our methods (at the time of writing when we are
three-quarters of the way through the project), we acknowledge that
our mixed method approach to our longitudinal analyses of secondary
data has provided us with some challenges, but we believe that this was
a worthwhile endeavour. We have been able to maintain a continuous
dialogue that has allowed us to corroborate findings emerging from the
analyses of the MOP data, and enabled an iterative research process.
This, however, has been less successful when making direct comparisons
between qualitative and quantitative analyses, and when asking the
same research questions of these analyses. The limitations of these two
types of data, and their analytical fit, has not lent itself to this sort of
blending. Rather, both types of analytical method have made distinctive
contributions towards the project and to our understanding of time,
volunteering and the lifecourse.
Learning from our mixed method longitudinal secondary

data analysis
At the start of this chapter, we observed that undertaking mixed
methods research is not a straightforward process. It becomes very
complicated when we add a research topic that is concerned with
time, and draw on longitudinal, secondary datasets to undertake our
analyses. In this final section we reflect on what we have learnt from
this complicated and rather messy process, sharing learning that might
be of benefit to those conducting longitudinal mixed method studies in
the future. We reflect on: our choice of research design; the analytical
55
fit between our quantitative and qualitative data; and how our datasets
have lent themselves to answering our substantive research questions
in relation to longitudinal time and the lifecourse.
Research design
Reusing data that has been collected by others is often thought of

as a time-saving process, cutting out the investment of resources
associated with collecting primary data. But it is not without its own
challenges. In this study we had to invest time and financial resources
in choosing and preparing the data (particularly the qualitative data7),
and weighing up how our data sources fitted together temporally and
thematically. It was particularly difficult to decide which quantitative
datasets we should reuse. The BHPS/US did not offer as much data
relating to our substantive research questions as a cross-sectional dataset
like the Citizenship Survey. However, the value of this dataset was
its longitudinality, which provided a good fit with the longitudinal
possibilities offered by the MOP. Both datasets allowed us to follow
individuals across time, although the timeframe in the survey data was
limited by the questions asked by the research instruments.
The timing of our analyses also provided challenges. The aim was for
the quantitative and qualitative analyses to be concurrent, so that they
could be in continuous dialogue with each other and thus encourage
an iterative approach. When work began, the starting points of the
analyses, the ordering of the analyses and the length of time taken to
draw conclusions, differed. In particular, the qualitative data preparation
and analysis took longer than the quantitative work. Although we
were able to share emerging themes and hypotheses, these differences
in progression and timing increased the difficulty in maintaining
dialogue throughout the analysis. With retrospect, a staggered start,
with the quantitative analysis beginning after the qualitative, might
have benefited the project.
Analyses
We envisioned three types of dialogue that would bring the quantitative

and qualitative analyses together. These included direct comparisons of
the data and analyses, a continuous iterative dialogue/feedback loop,
and combining the substantive findings in order to answer complex,
mixed, research questions.
As anticipated, due to the nature and limitations of the different
datasets being used we were not particularly successful in undertaking
56
direct comparisons between our different datasets and analyses.

In contrast, although we experienced difficulties relating to the
timing and concurrency of our analyses, we were able to maintain
a continuous iterative dialogue. Moreover, this dialogue represented
the methodological heart of the project. It included discussion of the
differences in our research instruments and how these affected our
analyses and conceptualisation of time. We discussed and recorded
emerging themes and hypotheses. We identified where the data and
findings complemented, or built on each other. We questioned whether
or not (in the case of our project at least), it was essential for the
different datasets to be comparable directly. Perhaps most importantly,
we considered how we might bring together the ideas and concepts
that were emerging from the separate analyses in an iterative and
ongoing fashion. At the time of writing this chapter, we are in the
process of a final dialogue, bringing together our substantive findings,
exploring evidence and ideas from different angles, and combining and
interweaving the results of our quantitative and qualitative analyses.
Time and the lifecourse
A key consideration when undertaking analyses of our datasets was

that we should be aware of what type of time our datasets were able
to describe and measure. The aim of our mixed method longitudinal
approach was to bring together three different sorts of time:
• the flow of personal biographical time, connecting the lifecourse,

volunteering activities and attitudes to voluntarism, in MOP writers’
narratives;
• chronological time, moving from one year to the next, in the

variables about social characteristics and volunteering attitudes and
behaviour, repeatedly collected through the cohort studies;
• contextual public/collective time, in which we were particularly

interested in the historical ebbs and flows of prosperity and austerity.
The way that these multiple forms of time interact and intersect (or not)
was at the heart of the mixed methods effort for our research project.
Unfortunately, our survey data, which is anchored in chronological
time, was unable to provide us with clear evidence of the relationship
between lifecourse events and volunteering. Its primary value was in
providing an understanding of who was volunteering, and how their
attitudes towards voluntarism have changed across calendar time.
However, the survey data also offered the potential to be mapped onto
57
historical/collective events and changes in social and economic policy

over time, and to explore the relationship between individual changes
in behaviours and attitudes and changes in national events over time.
We found that individuals like our volunteer Sarah, whom we met
earlier in the chapter, reduced the intensity and frequency of their
formal volunteering in 2008. We might infer that this was associated
with the 2008 economic crisis.
In the MOP narratives, where individuals moved through
biographical time, writers described the relationships between personal
lifecourse events and their volunteering attitudes and behaviours.
However, few writers made explicit connections between external
events, the lifecourse and volunteering, requiring us to look for inferred
connections and associations. We are unsure why writers did not make
these connections. This negative evidence has made us reconsider the
potential of a data source like the MOP for examining the influence of
public, external events on individuals. We are of the view that further
work on this data source is required to explore its temporal limitations
when considering the relationship between the public and the private.
Although we hoped that our qualitative and quantitative datasets
would provide us with a multidimensional picture of volunteering
behaviour and attitudes across time, each dataset was unable to provide
a comprehensive picture on its own. However, when bringing our
longitudinal analyses and findings together, we have been able to build
up the multilayered picture that we were aiming for, demonstrating
the value of a mixed method approach.
The multilayered picture resulting from mixing methods has been
at its strongest in providing a comprehensive and complimentary
understanding of the way in which individuals move in and out of
volunteering throughout the lifecourse. The proportion of people who
are long-term volunteers is relatively small, amounting to less than a
third of BHPS/US respondents. Crucially however, these individuals
contributed over half the total amount of voluntary activity reported by
BHPS/US respondents over time. We had hoped that the BHPS could
provide some correlation between life course events, public events and
volunteering behaviours, for example, showing a relationship between
early retirement and volunteering in the economic crisis year of 2008.
Unfortunately, the data was not able to provide this sort of explicit
correlation. Nevertheless we did find that the contribution of BHPS
long-term volunteers became less intense and less frequent in this
particular year. MOP writers, who were also long-term volunteers,
wrote at length about the trigger points for entering and exiting
volunteering, many of which were linked to lifecourse events. Entrance
58
trigger points for some individuals represented exit trigger points for
others. These include events such as starting a job, children entering
the education system, or a spouse taking retirement. Several mentioned
their spouse taking early retirement during the economic crisis of
2008. The fact that for some writers this was a trigger for ending their
volunteering, while for others it was a trigger for beginning meant that
we could argue there may have been more exiting and entering into
volunteering in this year than suggested by the survey data. Indeed, the
recessionary effects on volunteering can be hard to evidence if relying
only on one type of data source.
Conclusion
The aim of this chapter was to explore the methodological and
analytical challenges encountered when reusing and combining
longitudinal qualitative and quantitative data to take a lifecourse
approach to studying volunteering. In particular, we have reflected on
the temporal aspect of this mixed methods endeavour. Our conclusion
is that, at times, working through the methodological issues involved
has been a messy and difficult process. An initial issue that we faced
was that when working across our multiple data sets (Mass Observation
narratives and cohort surveys) the temporal and substantive fit was
not exact and seamless. Despite the limitations this posed for direct
comparison of qualitative and quantitative data, we hope that we have
conveyed that a mixed methods dialogue had the advantage of enabling
us to combine the breadth of an extensive quantitative perspective
with the depth of an intensive qualitative approach. We discussed
the implications of the uneven fit between the different data sets for
bringing them into dialogue, which became complementary rather
than directly compatible. A key issue here was the different sorts of time
being engaged with through the data sets: chronological time through
the cohort survey data which links into public/collective time; and
personal biographical time in our narrative material which could be
held against, but did not establish links to, public/collective time within
itself. We argue that the process of grappling with these challenges
has enhanced our understanding of the value of mixing methods to
examine substantive questions related to time and the lifecourse.
Notes
1
The project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council under its first
Secondary Data Analysis Initiative (SDAI), grant number ES/K003550/1.
59
2
See www.massobs.org.uk/mass_observation_project.html
3
See www.natcen.ac.uk/our-research/research/british-social-attitudes/
4
See https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/bhps. Northern Ireland was not included within
the data collection until 2001; this reduces how representative the sample is of the UK.
5
The gender imbalance and loss of two writers from the project relate to problems
in accessing metadata on individual writers held by the Mass Observation Archive
(MOA). We have worked in partnership with the MOA to gain funding from the
ESRC, through the SDAI2, grant number ES/L013819/, to improve the quality of
its metadata.
6
This approach required an acknowledgement that we, the researchers, were exploring
writers’ lifecourses through the hierarchical lens of our own subjectivities, rather than
‘walking alongside’ the writers (Neale et al, 2012). We sought to offset this by exploring
some writing using different analytical methods that might allow the voices of the
writers to speak without the militating effects of our researcher identities.
7
See Lindsey and Bulloch (2014) for a detailed discussion of the difficulties relating
to preparing MOP material.
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‘re-using’ Mass Observation data in a longitudinal mixed-methods
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61
FOUR
A restudy of young workers from the

1960s: researching intersections of
work and lifecourse in one locality
over 50 years
John Goodwin and Henrietta O’Connor
Introduction
Since 2000 we have been undertaking a detailed restudy of Norbert
Elias’s previously lost ‘Adjustment of Young Workers to Work
Situations and Adult Roles’ (1962–4) project.1 This project was not
only important because of its links to Norbert Elias or because it was
one of the largest studies of school to work transition at that time (see
Goodwin and O’Connor, 2005a), but also because there are very few
‘classic’ studies from the post war period that focused on the English
East Midlands and a key centre of engineering, textiles and clothing
and footwear manufacture. As part of the restudy we have considered
the intersections of work, lifecourse and locality (see Goodwin and
O’Connor, 2005a; 2005b; 2006a; 2006b; 2007a; 2007b; O’Connor
and Goodwin, 2004; 2010; 2012; 2013a). For example, analysis of the
data reveals that the transition from school to work in the 1960s was
far more complex than previously thought by academics and policy
makers. While the local labour market was initially buoyant, and fairly
distinct from other local labour markets in terms of the levels of work
available in specific sectors, examination of individual lives suggests
that quality jobs were hard to obtain and retain. Moreover, the ‘gold
standard’ of apprenticeship was not always experienced as the most
rigorous or complete approach to training. The lives of these once
young workers also reveal how vulnerable workers are to changes in
the global economy. For example, individuals interviewed thought
that they were entering ‘jobs for life’ and did not foresee the drastic
labour market change and transformation that beset the local economy
from the late 1970s onwards. Such change had significant impacts on
63
subsequent careers with very few able to work in the industries for
which they had originally trained.
Our research was made possible by a chance rediscovery, in an attic
office, of 851 original interview schedules as well as some background
documents written by a research team from the 1960s. The 1960s
research was funded by the Department of Scientific and Industrial
Research, and carried out by the Department of Sociology at the
University of Leicester, UK. The original research concentrated on
how young people experienced work and adjusted their lives to new
work roles in adulthood. The rediscovery of the interview booklets,
and associated materials, presented us with something of a unique
chance to re-examine work and employment of young people in the
1960s and the tantalising opportunity to design and undertake a restudy
to ascertain what subsequently happened to those respondents as the
Leicester labour market changed and transformed in the intervening
40 to 50 years. Even from our initial readings of the original interview
booklets we were deeply engrossed by the richly detailed and fascinating
insights they provided. The interview booklets were a veritable treasure
trove that captured the qualitative experiences of one group of young
people living in Leicester, UK, during the 1960s. Yet despite the draw
of these detailed accounts there were fuller life stories that we wanted to
examine promoted by what we read: What had happened to these young
workers after the interviews had been completed? How did their lives pan out?
Looking at the timespan between the original research and our
rediscovery we knew that most of the once young workers would be
now in their mid to late 50s and perhaps contemplating retirement or
thinking about the end of their working lives. Although most were still
effectively children at the time of the interview and were still living
in their family homes with their parents and siblings (see O’Connor
and Goodwin, 2013b), most would now have married or had
relationships, become parents themselves, had grandchildren, suffered
bereavements and so on. They would also have lived through at least
three major recessions and were first hand witnesses to the massive de-
industrialisation of the City of Leicester that had occurred continually
pretty much from the moment they first entered the labour market
in the early 1960s. Indeed, when they transitioned into the Leicester
labour market in the early 1960s, little could they have expected the
economic turmoil they would face throughout the rest of their working
lives. At 15 the young workers would have reasonably expected a
‘job for life’ given the experiences of their parent’s generation, as one
apprentice reflected ‘… [with] any apprenticeship you’ve got a future.
You’ve got five years for a start and then after that you can rely on a
64
A restudy of young workers
decent wage every week afterwards for the rest of your life’. Yet, some
50 years later very little of the industries they initially entered would
remain as Leicester experienced a massive decline in these traditional
industries that provided employment for the local community. For
this group of workers the relatively smooth ‘cradle to grave’ career
did not materialise, with the confidence and optimism of many of
those entering work in the early and mid 1960s being misplaced and
ultimately denied. With the disappearance of local companies such
as Corah, British United Shoe Machine Company and Byfords, a
whole community of shared work experience was transformed and
or largely disappeared. How was the impact of such massive process
deindustrialisation ‘written’ into the biographies of local people?
Given the possibilities suggested by the data would it really be possible
to transform this failed study from the 1960s from a cross-sectional study
into a restudy and find the respondents? Would it be possible bring these
life stories up to date? Could a re-analysis of this data and subsequent
restudy provide us with a unique understanding of the continuity and
changes within a single labour market over a 50-year period? In the
remainder of this chapter we begin by locating the Adjustment of Young
Workers to Work Situations and Adult Roles in the broader cannon of
‘classic’ work, family and community work, family and community
studies arguing that such legacy studies can represent something of a
starting point for lifecourse research and should no longer be ignored
as ‘historical curiosities’. We then outline our research design with
the intention of providing something of a blueprint for other restudy
based lifecourse research. Following this we reflect on some of the
methodological complexities of researching work and the lifecourse
in the way that we did.
The ‘need’ to look back: past studies as starting point for

lifecourse research
The period between 1945 and 1985 in British sociology was marked
by a substantial number of classic studies that richly documented
the experiences of work, family and community in a wide range of
specific localities. These studies, some 50 to 60 years later, continue
to provide a great deal of source material, both published and archival
material, for those who are interested in the work, employment
and life experiences of this period, work in particular community
settings or, indeed, those interested in the change and transformation
of labour. Classic studies such as Coal is our life (Dennis, Henriques
and Slaughter, 1956), The family life of old people (Townsend, 1957),
65
The blackcoated worker (Lockwood, 1958), Family and class in a London

suburb (Willmott and Young 1960), Married women working (Jephcott
et al, 1962), Home, school and work (Carter, 1962), The family and social
change (Rosser and Harris, 1965), The affluent worker in the class structure
(Goldthorpe et al, 1969), Life on the dole (Jones, 1972), Girls, wives
and factory lives (Pollert, 1981) or All day every day (Westwood, 1984)
have all added significantly to our understanding of work and locality
and have offered meaningful insights into the history of employment,
family and community in the UK.
However, while such studies endure as classic research, and while
they still have a significant amount of insights to offer contemporary
analyses, in the main they are now relegated to ‘snapshots in time’ that
are only used as historical ‘curiosities’ if they are used at all. Yet, we
would suggest that for anyone interested in lifecourse research such
legacy studies represent something of a ‘starting point’ and that the
wholesale disregarding of such legacy studies in the social sciences is
highly problematic for a number of reasons. First, within the social
sciences, and sociology in particular, disciplinary boundaries or, more
recently, the need for ‘impact’, have created an inexorable pressure
for sociologists to narrow their gaze to the present, to the ‘here and
now’ and to focus on ‘contemporary problems’ (see Elias, 1987). Yet
such an approach implies that the ‘here and now’ or the issues of the
‘contemporary’ are somehow hermetically sealed off from what went
before. Or more problematically what ‘issues’ there are – be it youth
unemployment, the problems of older age and so forth – have simply
emerged out of nowhere. Such an approach is both arbitrary and
epistemologically fallacious, as Dunning and Hughes (2013, p 70)
suggest:
[Sociology] ought to be centrally concerned with the

study of social events and processes in space and time. This
means the conventional view according to which sociology
and history are separate subjects, one concerned with ‘the
present’, the other with ‘the past’, is arbitrary and wrong.
We are also very much inspired here by Elias’s ‘sociological practice’

and the three types of research question that underpinned his approach.
These are:
1. questions of ‘Homines aperti’, or what broader chains of

interdependence are involved in ‘this’ (see Goodwin and Hughes,
2011, p 682);2
66
2. relational questions, such as in what ways are ‘these interdependencies’

related; and
3. sociogenetic questions, such as how did ‘this’ come to be (see

Goodwin and Hughes, 2011).
For example, a good starting point for understanding the intersections

of work, lifecourse and locality is to ask the question how did ‘this’
come to be – how did it come to be that in certain localities life
histories are marked by significant periods of unemployment and
underemployment? Such questions can only be answered by ‘looking
back’ at change and transformation over time and the reworking
of classic and/or legacy studies are, perhaps, an essential aid to this
research process.
Second, and a related point, is that the disregard of legacy studies is
largely based on a progress model of scientific knowledge that implies
all knowledge is a linear product that ‘flows’ in one direction. Again
Dunning and Hughes (2013, p 126) are useful here as they illustrate
this approach by evoking Elias’s metaphor of swimmers diving into the
‘stream of knowledge at particular times and places’ with the place that
the swimmer ‘dives in’ being location from which all advancements
originate. Yet, how do we use the knowledge amassed before we
‘dive in’? Do we disregard material from the past as old, unusable and
meaningless? Or do we revisit and restudy them to find out what can
be (re)learned?
Third, unless using large-scale longitudinal data, such as the British
Birth Cohort Studies, a dominant model of lifecourse research prompts
researchers in the direction of starting new considerations in the ‘here
and now’, requiring respondents to look back and reflect on their lives,
rather than returning to the actual findings and data from legacy studies
and developing reconsiderations of respondent’s lives about whom so
much is already ‘known’. Returning to undertake full restudies of the
lives of those already documented through studies such as The Affluent
Worker in the Class Structure or Coal is our Life has the potential to make
a substantial contribution to lifecourse research, not only because of
their ‘historical interest’ but because such ‘restudy based’ lifecourse
research would be starting from an existing knowledge base. This could,
for example, contribute to an understanding of labour market change
and offer comprehensive insights into the impacts of such change, and
other social changes, on and within individual life histories. As Laub
and Sampson (2003, pp 284–5) argue:
67
Because our focus is on within-individual patterns of

stability and change, we must rely on longitudinal data that
other investigators began collecting many years ago in order
to empirically study various life adaptations over the long
term. There is no other way to proceed.
Or as Brown (2001, p 1) suggests,
There are in my view still too few studies which involve

re-interviewing respondents about whom information is
already available from an earlier project so as to provide a
longitudinal dimension … [and] it is important to seize
every possibility which does occur.
Our chance discovery of a ‘lost’ classic research project, from the same
period as those highlight above, presented us exactly with the prospect
Brown described as it afforded us the possibility of transforming a once
cross-sectional study into a longitudinal study of single group of workers
in the same locality over a 50-year timespan. Such an opportunity
inevitably prompted the questions:
• What actually became of the young workers from this study?

• How have their experiences of work and employment changed and

transformed over the course of their own lives (how did their lives
become to be ‘this’)?
• Is it possible to conduct a restudy, perhaps similar to Laub and

Sampson (2003), that will fully reveals the ‘within-individual’
patterns of continuity and change – the continuities and changes
within one group of once young workers interviewed originally in
the early to mid 1960s?
From young workers to older workers: from original study

to restudy
The original research was ‘concerned with the problems which young
male and female workers encounter during their adjustment to their
work situation and their entry into the world of adults’ (Young Worker
Project, 1962, p 2). Elias suggested that young workers have to make
an adjustment to roles that were not fully understood by them and
for which schools had not prepared them. He was also concerned to
investigate ‘these wider adjustments which young workers have to
make in their relationships with older workers and supervisors in the
68
factory or workshop; to the problems and to their role as workers;

and to their roles as money earners in home relations and in their
leisure time’ (Young Worker Project, 1962, p 2). This position was
translated into five specific areas of enquiry: adjustment to relationships
with older workers and supervisors; adjustment to job problems;
adjustment to role as workers; adjustment to role as ‘money-earner’
in home relations; and adjustment to role as ‘money-earner’ in leisure
time. From this, a semi-structured interview schedule was developed
that contained 82 questions split across five sections: Work; Family
and Expenditure; Leisure; School and Work; and General. The interview
schedule also included an event history diary to capture in detail the
respondents’ early work experiences. The interviewers were asked to
write all answers to questions verbatim if possible and always in as full
detail as the time and circumstances allowed. The interviewers was
also asked to make a series of general comments at the end of the
interview schedule giving the interviewers’ general impression from
the interview, noting any problems connected with work, family or
leisure. The interviews were conducted with a sample of young people
drawn from the Youth Employment Office index of all Leicester school
leavers from the summer and Christmas of 1960 and the summer and
Christmas of 1962. The target group was to include all those with
one year’s further education and the sample was further structured by
the school attended (secondary, technical, grammar or other), by the
size of firm entered in first job and whether they were trainees or not.
The sample was divided up into five sub-groups and, using a table of
random numbers, a target sample of 1,150 young people was identified
and 882 interviews were completed. An additional 28 interviews
were undertaken as part of a pilot study in a nearby town. Fieldwork
began in 1962 and ended in 1964. As we have outlined elsewhere (see
Goodwin and O’Connor, 2005a) just as the fieldwork was completed,
the research team had resigned (due to problems with working practice,
academic direction, and disagreements about the structure of the sample
structure and the theoretical framework). Ashton and Field (1976) used
a sample of the cases in their work; however, the majority of the data
was never analysed or published until our restudy.
In 2000 the rediscovered interview schedules formed the basis of a
restudy in which we aimed to trace and re-interview a sample of the
original respondents in order to explore work and transitions throughout
the lifecourse. The restudy was designed and operationalised as follows:
Transcription of original data. The original interview studies were
originally found in an attic office and the first task was to sort the
schedules to ascertain the full extent of the data we had. Following
69
collation and sorting the data were transcribed and entered into a
Filemaker Pro 7 database. As suggested above, although previously
not fully analysed, these interview schedules provide very detailed
information on the transition to work in the 1960s. Given the
complexity of the data it was essential that we had an easy mechanism
for accessing, searching and manipulating the data and, as such, a
bespoke database that mirrored the design of the original interview
schedules was thought to be essential.
Secondary analysis of the data. We then undertook a full secondary
analysis of the interview schedules to identify key themes (such as
the complexity of past school to work transitions, the influence of
family and gender on the transition process, and the experiences of
young people in the midst of an ‘adult world’ of work) to drive the
future direction of the work. This included a secondary analysis of
the extensive interviewer notes included at the back of each book. As
we, and others have argued elsewhere, the use of interviewer notes
as a starting point for restudies and secondary analysis is essential (see
Savage, 2005; Goodwin and O’Connor, 2006a; 2009).
Analysis of background literature and correspondence. As suggest above,
alongside the discovery of interview schedules we also retrieved a
limited amount of supporting documentation written by the original
research team. However, these materials were partial, incomplete and
inconsistent at best. As such it became clear that, in order to make
effective use of the data, we needed to understand a great deal more
about the design and operationalisation of the original research.
However, Savage (2005, p 2) offers a cautionary note by suggesting
‘given the impossibility of archiving the original and complete context
in which qualitative studies were conducted, there are doubts about
how researchers are really able to use such material to assess the validity
of classic studies themselves’. To address this we adopted a two-pronged
approach. First, we contacted known surviving members of the 1960s
research team for an interview and to seek permission to access any
archived materials they had. Some of the research team had retained
extensive archives of correspondence and notes relating to the project
(see Goodwin and O’Connor, 2005a; O’Connor and Goodwin,
2013a). Second, a significant source of documentary evidence relating
to the original research was the archived collection of Norbert Elias’s
papers at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach, Germany. We were
able to visit to the archive and retrieve correspondence, draft papers and
other documents relating to Elias’s interests in youth transitions. These
documents provided significant insight into the project design, sample
composition and Elias’s emerging ‘transition as shock’ hypothesis;
70
moreover, the correspondence and memorandum detailed the reasons

for the failure of the original research (see Goodwin and O’Connor,
2005a)
Tracing original respondents. To have any chance of exploring work
and employment over the lifecourse we needed to find the original
respondents. We did this by adopting a range of approaches. First,
for those respondents who originally gave consent, we wrote to
their last known address. Such an approach, while effective, is
problematic. We were only able to do this as the original interview
schedules contained extensive biographical data that, following current
research conventions, would have been removed from the interviews
as a part of an anonymisation process. Such a practice has obvious
implications for any researcher interested in revisiting data and the
same respondents. Indeed, the removal of biographical data renders
much archived data useless for those wanting to undertake a restudy
(for a wider discussion of this, see O’Connor and Goodwin 2013a).
We had to request permission from the ESRC to use this data as the
basis for the restudy and offered assurances that all identifiers would
be removed on completion of the whole project. Second, we made
use of publicly available sources such as the local telephone directory
and the electoral register. Third, we also employed a publicity strategy
using local print and broadcast media for advertisements and public
appeals. We also utilised the internet in the tracing process and the
details of our respondents were checked against data contained on the
Friends Reunited website (www.friendsreunited.co.uk). Finally, where
we had found respondents and were able to re-interview them, we
asked the respondents if they were still in contact with their school
friends and checked their responses against the names we had from
the original 1960s data.
Follow up interviews. The follow up interviews were semi-structured,
covering topics such as work and life history, education and training,
relationships, families and households, income, older workers, and
retirement and leisure time activities. However, the research instrument
also included a qualitative topic guide to allow the respondents
to elaborate on aspects of their lives. Indeed, despite our research
instrument having some structure, the interviews tended to be more
open and qualitative in nature. The respondents often began the
interviews by talking about significant life events that meant the
interview schedule had to be adapted during the interview process.
We did not prevent any of the respondents from discussing issues that
they felt were significant. The respondent’s original responses to the
first study also generated further reflective data and it is clear that the
71
respondents enjoyed hearing about their answers from 40 years earlier.

The majority of the interviews were taped with consent, although a few
respondents did object and their responses were recorded in writing.
Visual methods and data. As well as the oral testimonies collected
through interviews we supplemented the standard interview technique
with photo elicitation. Initially conceived as an aide memoire we
asked the respondents to provide photographs of themselves at age
15 or 16 to use as a prompt to think about their lives to date. This
was supplemented with photographs of the respondents at the point
of interview and photographs of the factories and working sites that
were described in both the original and follow up interviews. Asking
respondents to provide picture of themselves as teenagers proved
invaluable for a number of reasons. First, it was a useful starting point
for the interviews and often ‘broke the ice’ with respondents being
able to talk about themselves in the pictures and ease themselves into
the formal part of interview. Second, and following Elias’s assertion
that the past and present and not separate but are instead linked as part
of the same processes, we wanted the respondents to talk about how
their lives had changed in the intervening 50 years. The pictures served
as a useful prompt to think about key life events and how these had
unfolded since leaving school. For some, this was quite an emotional
experience as the images evoked previous relationships, previous
friendships, family members and themselves as younger people. Third,
we were keen to revisit early work experiences and the photographs
served as something of a mechanism for this. The pictures disrupted
the then and now dichotomy. It was less about ‘that was me then’ and
‘this is me now’ but more a prompt to discuss a process of ‘becoming’,
discussing themselves and the processes of change and transformation.
Finally, and almost inevitably, the pictures prompted discussions of
fashions and style as well as body image and ageing. We used these as
cues to ask the respondents to describe themselves ‘then’ further and
to reflect on what they were like as youngsters. For example:
R: well that’s a photograph of all my chums there … that’s

when I went on holiday with one of my friends …
HO’C: Where are you?

R: There … yeah, we all had quiffs in those days, and

Brylcream
HO’C: [laughs] it’s a brilliant photo, really good,

R: yeah, tells a thousand words doesn’t it.

JG: How, how would you describe yourself in that photo,

looking back?
72
R: Cool cat [laughs]… We had a crew cut then, oh yeah,

yeah, you had to have the baseball boots as they were
called in those days. This was on a school holiday in
Lynmouth, er, that was meself, that was [xxxx]. That
bloke works for the [xxxx], a bloke called [xxxx], he’s a
photographer ... It looks like I’m holding a hand there
but I’m not,<end dialogue>
The respondent’s comment that the picture ‘tells a thousand words’

encapsulated fully what we wanted to achieve with the pictures. The
images gave us significant insights that would not have been as ‘clear’ if
the respondents had described their younger selves without such visual
prompts. A further issue is the response that the pictures provoked from
us as researchers. Not being alive at the time of the original interview,
the pictures for us located the respondent’s temporally, located them
within workplace settings or particular localities within the city that
we had no way of ‘knowing’ otherwise. Beyond this, the images also
evoked personal reflections and memories of similar pictures of our
parents and other family members from that time, which somehow,
made the research more meaningful.
Some reflections on methodological complexities

The process of transforming a once cross-sectional study from the
1960s into a longitudinal study that would offer usable and meaningful
insights into the working lives of one community of workers over
a 50-year period was fraught with methodological complexity and
uncertainty despite our clearly worked out strategy. To that end we
have had to engage directly with the methodological issues generated
by the research from the outset. For example, our approach to studying
the lifecourse through reusing data from a legacy study raises obvious
ethical concerns around authenticity, voice, issues of representation of
both the researchers and researched, and the legitimate use of previously
collected biographical data. All of these concerns can only be dealt
with by careful very handling of the data, sympathetic analysis of the
data and a recognition that in undertaking restudies of past work we are
not here to audit the sociological research practice of past researchers
or fieldworkers (O’Connor and Goodwin, 2013a). Likewise, there are
epistemological and ontological concerns. The very act of repurposing
data could be viewed as being equally problematic. As Savage (2005)
again suggests it is, perhaps, unclear how such data from legacy studies
can ‘… be used to address different questions to those posed by the
73
original researchers. Given that the past studies inevitably address

questions posed by past researchers, how much of the material is likely
to be prescient to contemporary researchers?’ (Savage, 2005, p 2).
However, as we have seen above, artificially separating the past and
present in this dualistic manner is unhelpful and only serves to reinforce
a sense of the past that is somehow separate to the present. Despite the
apparently different concerns of the researchers who worked on the
original legacy studies and ourselves, the data has much to offer for
those who revisit it and re-examine it via a ‘contemporary lens’ (see
Goodwin and O’Connor, 2006a).
However, despite our continued and necessary engagement with
these debates, there are two further issues relevant to lifecourse research
that we would wish to highlight here. First, to undertake lifecourse
research in this way relies on the ability of later researcher to trace
respondents and/or participants of those earlier studies. For this to be
successful means that later researchers need to have access to original
sampling frames, original project notes and, most difficult of all, some
biographical identifiers if the idea is to identity the same individuals (less
important if subsequent research wants an approximate or ‘matched’
sample). As suggested above we were incredibly fortunate that such
personal identifiers had not been stripped out of the interview booklets;
however, even if one has access to biographical identifiers the tracing
of respondents over time is not straightforward.
With the biographical information for the interview booklets, and
using the tracing methods outlined above, we located 157 of the
original respondents (representing around 18 per cent of the original
sample). Of these 97 were re-interviewed. However, actual tracing
methods themselves were hugely variable in their success rate. We
obtained greater positive outcomes for this group by using ‘traditional’
communication methods such as mail and telephone. We originally held
high expectations of being able to use the Internet to track down our
respondents but the effectiveness of web based search was limited and
somewhat disappointing (see Table 4.1 for breakdown). An additional
problem was that the tracing of the respondents took far longer that
we had envisaged, with respondents replying to our letters up until
the end of the funded phase of the research. Moreover once we had
managed to locate respondents it could often take multiple phone calls
and letters to secure agreement for access and re-interview. Nor was
identifying and finding respondents any guarantee that the respondents
would agree to participating in the restudy. Of the 60 traced but
not interviewed, they either refused to participate, were traced and
subsequently moved overseas, or died between the tracing and the
74
Table 4.1: Tracing the respondents: contact methods and responses

Contact method
Direct mail – electoral register/telephone directory 1,200

Direct mail – original home address 650
Direct emails – Friends Reunited 27
Press advertisement – Leicester Mercury 5
Negative responses
Returned by Post Office 98
Returned as ‘wrong person’ 276
Positive tracing responses
Positive response by mail 49
Positive response by telephone/email 96
Positive response to press advertisement 3
Positive response from Friends Reunited 9
Of those traced
Refused to participate 50
Emigrated 5
Traced but deceased 5
Traced and re-interviewed 97
Total traced 157
follow up interview. In all there were 50 definite refusals to participate.

A common cause of refusal to participate was a suspicion on behalf of
the respondents that we had simply traced the ‘wrong person’. Given
the near 50-year time delay between original interview and possible
re-interview it was clear that many did not remember taking part in
the original research and they did not believe us when we suggested
they had indeed participated – even when we confirmed some basic
family details such as the addresses that they had previously occupied.
Finally, we also became aware that our methods were not capturing
many women (see Table 4.2). The main problem was marriage and
the changing of names. As such, techniques such as searching the
electoral register and local marriage registers were ineffective for tracing
women and obviously the low proportion of women represents a clear
limitation for this approach to research the lifecourse.
A second concern relates to what data we should share with those
respondents who we traced and re-interviewed. The argument above
is that there is clear analytical value in basing studies on respondents
about whom something is already known. Almost inevitably, given the
75
Table 4.2: Sample descriptions and composition
Group Original target Archive Reinterviewed

sample sample
Pilot study 28 0 -
Practice* 16 - -
Actual study
‘A’ – boys who had left school in summer 330 243 26
or Christmas 1962, with less than one
year’s further education.
‘B’ – boys who had left school in summer 160 130 27
or Christmas 1962, with more than one
‘C’ – boys who had left school in summer 300 202 34
‘D’ – girls who had left school in summer 200 155 6
‘E’ – girls who had left school in summer or 160 105 4
Christmas 1960, with less than one year’s
further education.
Totals 1,150 (28) † 85 (16)† 97
Notes: * The practice schedules appeared to be ‘dry-run’ interviews with actual respondents. Some vary
in the degree to which they were completed. † Totals including practice/pilot surveys.
focus of our research and our interest in their lives, and the fact that we
had data relating to an earlier study, the respondents themselves clearly
wanted to find out more about their own early lives and their own
responses to original interviews conducted in the 1960s. Our initial
responses to request for access to the data was that we should simply
share the original interview booklets with the respondents. However,
such an approach raised a number of significant challenges. First, as
we have documented elsewhere (see Goodwin and O’Connor, 2006a;
2009) the field notes section of the interview booklets contained
the initial reactions or thoughts of the fieldworkers, some of which
(and perhaps reflected broader social changes as well as changes in
research practices) were sexist, racist, biased in terms of social class,
or contained commentaries of family members, friends and relatives
or the respondents themselves that were less than positive. Access to
such commentaries could cause needless upset and anger. As such we
decided to either redact or fully remove the interviewer notes sections
from any data we handed over to the respondents. Second, the point at
which we shared data was also crucial as we neither wanted to appear
76
as if we were simply ‘fact checking’ the data in the earlier interviews

nor did we want to provide the earlier responses that may shape,
influence or alter answers to our questions in the follow up study. To
resolve the two issues we decided that we would give the respondents
their full interview transcript, minus the field notes at the end of the
interview, but where there was uncertainty (such as the dates of early
jobs, names of employers) we would refer to the original interview data
to help clarify the sequencing of events and to ensure that we obtain
as accurate a picture of work in the lifecourse as possible.
Conclusions
Despite the complexity of using a ‘legacy study’ as the starting point
for our restudy, despite the time it took to trace the respondents,
negotiate with the past research team, re-code and transcribe 851
interview transcripts of handwritten, sometimes unreadable script,
it is clear to us that developing an understanding of the lives of one
group of young then older workers in one locality in the way that
we have done was both fascinating and incredibly rewarding. It was
a complex process, and it was messy in many respects but, as Brown
(2001) and others suggest, we as researchers need to do more of this
type of research, engaging in further ‘looking back’ at old studies and
revisiting those about whom much is already know if we are to fully
understand the intersections of work, locality and the lifecourse in all
of their rich and varied complexities. Indeed, such an approach as the
one we adopted would be a useful model to follow for anyone interested
in questioning the assumed linearity in people’s lives or the assumed
logical and standard sequencing of life events in the ‘past’, the ‘present’
and the ‘future’. By revisiting respondents about whom we already
know so much we have been able to demonstrate that very few have
lived anything remotely representing a ‘standard’ linear life demarcated
by particular events at particular times. As Elias suggests the ‘idea that
people have always experienced … sequences of events … as an even,
uniform and continuous flow … runs counter to evidence we have
from past ages as well as our own’ (Elias, 1992, p 33). Without such
restudies, without revisiting the past coupled with our over reliance
on the ‘cross-sectional snapshot’, so dominant in contemporary social
sciences, we run the risk of simply reinforcing the view of temporal
uniformity within and across lives.
77
Notes
1
This chapter is based on the ESRC project ‘From Young Workers To Older Workers:
Reflections on Work in the Life Course’ (R000223653).
2
Homines aperti being an approach to sociological analysis that emphasises
interdependence, rather than what Elias perceived the dominant homo clausus modes of
thinking in sociological analysis that positions ‘individuals’ as unique, separate ‘worlds
unto themselves’ (see Elias, 2000, p 472).
Acknowledgements
Our gratitude goes to the staff of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv and
the friends and colleagues at the Norbert Elias Foundation. We would
like to thank Nancy Worth and Irene Hardill for their patience while
we wrote this chapter and to colleagues and friends who presented at
the AAG Annual Conference, New York, February 2012.
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80
FIVE
A method for collecting

lifecourse data: assessing the
utility of the lifegrid
Ann Del Bianco1
Introduction
The lifecourse can be studied using a number of different research
designs and methodological approaches – all presenting their own set of
challenges and benefits. In recent years there has been increasing use of
the lifegrid for both quantitative and qualitative studies. The application
of the lifegrid is appealing to many researchers for a variety of reasons.
It is especially useful for studies where a longitudinal focus is integral to
the research objective(s), and such is the case with lifecourse research.
Compared with traditional longitudinal studies, the administration of
the lifegrid is a less costly alternative and is relatively easy to use with
some training (Holland et al, 1999).
The lifegrid is explored in its capacity as a data collection tool. The
aim of this chapter is threefold. Given that the critique of the lifegrid
is informed in part by others’ experiences of using the lifegrid, but
also in part by my own, the first aim of this chapter is to provide a
very brief overview of the research design, sample and method which
informed my experiences, providing some detail of the lifegrid itself
and drawing on a case study to demonstrate the type of output it may
generate. The second and primary aim of this chapter is to assess the
utility of the lifegrid and to suggest strategies which could potentially
be incorporated to overcome some of the challenges associated with its
use. The third and final aim of this chapter is to highlight the differences
between historical and narrative truths and explore how these play a
role in the types of data obtained via the use of the lifegrid.
81
The utilisation of the lifegrid in the exploration of the living

and working environments of oesophageal cancer patients
The lifegrid was used in a study which included a sample of 46
oesophageal cancer patients (see also Novogradec, 2012). These
participants were recruited by means of purposive sampling from
hospitals where ethics approval was obtained within the regions of
London and Toronto, Ontario. A narrative research design was utilised
whereby participants shared their life stories as it pertained to the
key risk factors for oesophageal cancer documented in the literature.
Participants’ narratives were provided around a predetermined set
of questions and variables of interest such that participants discussed
their experiences and exposures in relation to the same factors. In
this respect, the narratives collected were fairly structured. The main
objective of the study was to gain a context sensitive understanding
of the risk factors for oesophageal cancer. The living and working
environments of oesophageal cancer patients were examined in this
regard. I was interested in time and place, and how exposure risk
and individual response strategies were affected. In order to achieve
the study objectives, several sources of data were used to inform
the research. The lifegrid was one of the main data collection tools
utilised. However, it was implemented in conjunction with other
tools including a semi-structured interview guide, occupational and
residential summary boxes, occupational risk maps and residential
pictures, and a series of other supplementary research tools.
At the beginning of all interviews, participants were asked whether
they were familiar with the lifegrid. None of the participants had seen
such an interview tool and most were intrigued by its ability to capture
different aspects of their lives as shared during the interviews. The
function of the lifegrid was explained to all participants and they were
informed that the lifegrid would be completed with a pencil and eraser
such that corrections could easily be made and were to be expected.
The lifegrids were printed as two 11” by 17” spreadsheets. This larger
size was used to suit the older population and for ease in completion.
Used in its original form, the lifegrid looks like a spreadsheet with a
series of rows and columns with the former denoting a timeline and
the latter capturing variables of interest. Each blank lifegrid consisted
of 11 columns and 98 rows. From left to right, the headings of each
of the columns were as follows: (1) external event; (2) age; (3) year;
(4) personal/other life events; (5) education; (6) lifestyle: smoking;
(7) lifestyle: drinking; (8) residence; (9) occupation; (10) other; (11)
82
Assessing the utility of the lifegrid
other. The rows captured the contents of the columns by year and/
or age (Figure 5.1).
Lifegrids were prepared in advance, as suggested by Berney and
Blane (2003), in that both dates of birth and diagnosis were collected
prior to the interview. Also, all lifegrids were labelled with the same
external events occurring over time (for example, Terry Fox run/John
Lennon shot, fall of Berlin Wall, etc. – see Figure 5.1) which could
be used as ‘flashbulb memory cues’ during the interviews. Flashbulb
memory cues have the ability to capture the routine and mundane by
linking memories to extraordinary events (Berney and Blane, 2003).
For example, assuming the event was of some significance to the
participant, they may be able to remember exactly what they were
doing when they heard that the World Trade Towers had collapsed.
Before working with the lifegrid, participants were asked to verify
that the dates recorded on the lifegrid were correct. Personal life events
were added as participants shared their life stories (see column A in
Figure 5.1 for an example). Both life trajectories (long-term extended
patterns reflecting major life domains such as work, relationships,
and living arrangements; Belli, 1998) and life transitions (a discrete
life change or event within a trajectory often accompanied by shared
ceremonies or rituals such as a wedding ceremony; Mitchell, 2003)
were captured. The former were collected via stories told while filling
in the columns pertaining to occupations, residences, etc., and the
latter through the adoption of questions used in a study by Ravanera
et al (2004) which were incorporated in the semi-structured interview
guide and plotted on the lifegrid (see italicised text within columns A,
B, and E in Figure 5.1). During the interviews, a ruler was used to
ensure that information being conveyed was not mistakenly entered
into the wrong cells of the lifegrid.
The average length of each face-to-face interview was approximately
four hours. The average age of the sample was 66 years old; 91% of
interviews took place at the participant’s home. Approximately 83%
of the sample was either retired or too sick to return to work which
likely played a factor in participants’ ability to devote so much time
to the interview. Both methodological and technique triangulation
as described by Denzin (1978) and Humble (2009) were utilised to
validate and ensure completeness of the data. In line with Lieblich et
al’s (1998) works on narrative research, data was analysed via holistic-
content, categorical-content, and chi-square analyses. My research
demonstrated how lived experiences and exposures do not occur in
isolation.
83
Figure 5.1: Sample lifegrid
External Event Age Year A. Personal/Other B. C. Lifestyle D. Residence E. Occupations F. OTHER G. OTHER
Life Events Education
Smoking Drinking
1949 born Langton: parent's house (rent) environmental
Korean War 1 1950 tobacco smoke -
2 1951 father smoked
3 1952 in house
4 1953
5 1954
6 1955
7 1956 started
8 1957
9 1958
Vietnam War Began 10 1959
11 1960
12 1961
Cuban Missle Crisis 13 1962
J.F.K. shot 14 1963 1 pack/2 weeks
15 1964 stopped tobacco field (summer)/ township:
cleaning roads & trees (winter)
16 1965
17 1966 moved out of parents' house 1 p a c k /2. 5 d a ys fa rm d u rin g fa rm in g s e a s o n ; tobacco and potato farms
home (Delhi: rent) after
18 1967 1st car 26 oz rye/ few wks tobacco auction barn
shared with friends
19 1968 1st wife's child born
Man on moon/ 20 1969 1 p a c k /d a y frie n d 's p la c e (D e lh i: re n t) to b a c c o c o m p a n y (in d o o r) v e ry d u s ty wo rk
Woodstock Festival
21 1970 met wife & moved in together wife's parents' house tobacco farm (seasonal)
84
(Delhi:rent)
22 1971 2 p a c k /d a y D e lh i - L a n d St . h o u s e (re n t) Sawmill v e ry dusty work
Henderson scores goal 23 1972 wife's parents' house
(Delhi:rent)
24 1973 1st marriage Delhi - Cove Rd. house (rent) environmental
25 1974 1st biological son born tobacco smoke -
End of Vietnam War/ 26 1975 lived by creek for a month; then wife smoked in
Fall of Saigon rented farmhouse in Delhi house
27 1976
28 1977
29 1978 current address - old
farmhouse (rent)
30 1979 2nd biological son born
Terry Fox Run/John 31 1980
Lennon shot
Reagan & Pope John 32 1981 laid off - not enough work
Paul II shot
33 1982 wife had brain tumour removed drinking alone: 24 unemployed - collected
& became vegetative; beer, 40oz rum & unemployment insurance
hospitalized permanently; 26 oz rum/day
car accident
34 1983 tobacco farm (summers)/ sawmill very dusty work
house fire lived by creek: May-Dec with cousin (winters)
stressful
35 1984 farmhouse repaired back to current address - old social

farmhouse (rent) assistance
36 1985 mom passed away
Challenger & 37 1986
Chernobyl Accidents
38 1987 first child left home
39 1988 started relationship with current
1 beer/wk
partner (has 2 kids)
Fall of Berlin Wall 40 1989 divorced
41 1990
1st Gulf War 42 1991 father passed away
The lifegrid, used in conjunction with other supplementary tools,

was especially useful in providing a contextual understanding of
time and place in relation to the risk factors for oesophageal cancer.
Completed lifegrids allowed for the holism of lifecourse data to be
retained and provided a deeper understanding of the inter-relatedness
of life events and variables of interest (for example, living and working
environments, lifestyle). The completed lifegrid allows for a visual
depiction of the lifecourse and is an invaluable tool for case studies,
as demonstrated in Figure 5.1 and the following sample case study.
Case study: sample lifegrid as produced during data

collection
Figure 5.1 depicts a portion of a participant’s lifegrid as constructed
during the data collection stage. Pseudonyms have been used to retain
anonymity. All lifegrids were completed by hand; however, the lifegrid
provided in Figure 5.1 has been reproduced electronically. It is possible
that lifegrids could have been collected electronically rather than by
hand, but it is unclear how this may have impacted the unique interview
features of the lifegrid method such as participant–interviewer rapport
and dynamics as well as other aspects such as the length of the interview
and ease of making corrections and connections during data collection.
The completed lifegrid provides an illustrative understanding of
the lifecourse in whole and in part. When the participant provides
narratives and further elaboration it allows the researcher to gain a
better understanding of the participant’s life. Certain periods of time
are also often elucidated. For instance, as explained by the participant,
and depicted in Figure 5.1, it is learned that the life event of moving
out of their parents’ house (which is also a life transition), alongside
boredom at work (in farming), contributed to an increase in smoking
patterns in 1966. Later it is learned that the 1982–86 timeframe was
particularly stressful for the participant beginning with the permanent
hospitalisation of their spouse and a car accident, and ending when
their first child left the home (also a life transition). During this period
of time, drinking patterns were affected by life events (as denoted
by the arrow depicted in Figure 5.1, from column A to column C
– Drinking). Also, the lack of work, and later the temporary lack of
shelter resulting from a house fire, left caring for the children extremely
difficult. During this time, temporary homelessness via living by a
nearby creek was experienced for a seven-month period after which
time unemployment insurance and social assistance was collected.
However, the participant describes this experience as “camping out”.
85
It is apparent that this was not uncommon for the participant as he

had described doing so previously in 1975 when he was between
residences. It is later learned that the participant eventually started a
new relationship with someone else and sought closure via a divorce
from his first wife whom he reports he was not able to care for on his
own. The participant describes feeling the financial burden of raising
three children on his own over the years and how he did not want to
seek out social assistance but had no choice. He also describes how
drinking had become a coping mechanism for dealing with the stress
of losing a functional spouse (see also Figure 5.1, columns A, C –
Drinking, D, E, and F for a depiction).
A critique of the lifegrid and the incorporation of useful

strategies
As noted in my previous work (Novogradec, 2012), some of the
early uses of the lifegrid were reported by Balán et al (1969) and
Blum et al (1969) who researched the lifecourse in relation to social,
geographical and occupational mobility. Since then, the lifegrid has
been documented for its ability to aid in the accurate recall of socio-
demographic data when archival records from some 50 years prior
gathered from the Boyd Orr and Mass Observation Archive were
compared against present day responses (Berney and Blane, 1997).
Although Berney and Blane’s (1997) findings were based on a small
sample size and data were not tested against other interview methods,
other data collection tools which function in a similar fashion to the
lifegrid such as the life history calendar and event history calendar have
been tested and have shown good results (Yoshihama et al, 2005; Belli
et al, 2007; Sayles et al, 2010).
One of the greatest features of the completed lifegrid is that it
provides data transparency. It not only organises lifecourse data visually,
it also provides both a bird’s eye view of the entirety of the lifecourse
and easily allows for a visual representation of the clustering of events
(Holland et al, 1999; Novogradec, 2012). If the researcher enables
the participant to unpack their lives as they work their way through
completing the lifegrid, then there is little need to explicitly ask about
connections between different variables of interest collected and those
made apparent on the lifegrid. Conversely, if the participant does not
mention how different aspects of the lifecourse are connected, the
completed lifegrid provides the researcher an opportunity to directly
address findings as they appear on the lifegrid to better understand if,
how and why certain factors are related to each other. For instance,
86
the completed lifegrid may show that drinking history and a change
in residence occurred at the same time as a divorce. The participant’s
narrative will likely elucidate these connections, but if they do not, the
researcher can use the completed portion of the lifegrid to carefully
probe further (Novogradec, 2012).
The completed lifegrid visually displays connections and provides
an opportunity for the researcher to probe further given that the
connections are discussed shortly after being placed on the lifegrid as
returning to previously collected data for more detail may be a little
more challenging (Novogradec, 2012). The utilisation of the lifegrid
allowed for more robust data to be collected and meant that several
discoveries were made during the data collection stage rather than
later during analysis. For instance, it was often made clear why an
increase or decrease in drinking patterns may have occurred. A change
in occupation may also have been reported as playing a role in this
regard. Drinking patterns may have increased during a certain period
of time as a result of a change in work culture where drinking with
clients was reported as ‘part of doing business’ and was perceived as
integral to networking. On reflection, some participants were able to
provide explanations of drinking patterns in relation to other aspects
of their lives at a particular point in time, providing a contextual
understanding in this regard. Nevertheless, participants may or may
not always understand the reasons behind a change in behaviour. Just
as encountered when adopting more conventional research designs
and methodological approaches investigating these kinds of lifestyle
changes, the researcher should be mindful that participants may
problematise explanations. Hence researchers should be aware of the
types of knowledge claims that are being generated, as discussed further
in the section on knowledge claims, below.
For the researcher, the completed lifegrid aids in keeping order and
control over the large amount of detailed information being collected.
In this regard, a completed lifegrid is similar to having to maintain two
different, but similar, sets of field notes (Bell, 2005). The sequence of
events are more easily assessed in comparison to tapes or interview
transcripts and can shed light on unintelligible portions of recordings
or field notes (Bell, 2005).
The utilisation of the lifegrid assists in unveiling the omission of
certain information when probes pertaining to specific details are asked
(for example, employment similar in nature). However, researchers
should be aware that sequences of brief or similar natured employment
and/or residential occupancy are not always easily recalled despite
the use of various recall strategies outlined below. The inclusion of
87
structured narratives could be used to attempt to bridge some of these

gaps; however, even under these circumstances I found that narratives
do not necessarily always provide clarity as they are often jumbled.
Common to other interview methods, the ability to accurately
sequence the lifecourse is contingent on the participant’s ability to recall
and actively engage. Nevertheless, there are strategies which the use
of the lifegrid enables that assists in sequencing such as: i) bounding
information through the use of anchors or other information specific
to that period of time (for example, recalling their place of residence
when J.F.K. was shot or when they first married); and ii) renegotiating
information in light of other information (for example, noting that a
hiatus from work occurred later than originally reported as revealed
when recalling educational history). It is recommended that reference
to dated documents of relevance to residential and/or employment
history such as employment records be integrated if or when possible
in order to better trigger recall when accurate sequencing proves to
be challenging (Novogradec, 2012).
Recall strategies and their implications on the quantity and quality of

data and temporality
Initially applied primarily to quantitative studies and among an older

population, researchers have elicited accurate participant recall of simple
information namely through the use of: i) anchors (personal and/or
external life events and ‘flashbulb memory cues’); ii) the temporal
reference system; and iii) cross-referencing information against other
columns/variables of interest (Berney and Blane, 1997; Berney et
al, 2000; Holland et al, 2000; Berney and Blane, 2003; Edwards et
al, 2006). Other recall strategies such as: iv) retelling the lifecourse
in a chronological order; v) being mindful of the order of questions
asked; vi) integrating other sources of evidence; and vii) allowing
other family involvement/participation have also shown to be helpful
(Novogradec, 2012). Through the incorporation of these various recall
strategies, data quantity can be increased. These recall strategies are
now discussed further.
The reference to personal events is often used as anchors to pinpoint
transitions and trajectories. Like the use of external events (which are
based on historical truths), personal events can also be used as anchors
to ground recall. In fact, the recall of one event or piece of information
may prompt the recall of other lifecourse data. Encouraging strategies
can also be used to calculate an unknown date in relation to another
event. For example, a participant may recall having surgery the same
88
year that a sibling got married or a calculator can be used to work

back from known to unknown dates in time (for example, “my
granddaughter, who was born in 1953, was 15 when we moved out
of our country home”; Novogradec, 2012).
Bell (2005) has also reported that the quantity of data is increased
through the use of personal events but argues that the quality of data
is not since participants feel the need to continuously add events to
the lifegrids rather than elaborating on existing information. It is
argued that the end result is the production of event centred data
based on factual information (that is, what occurred at which time)
rather than a rich dataset (Bell, 2005). This could indeed be the case
with less forthcoming participants and those that do not respond to
probes or engage the researcher; however, in my experience preparing
participants in advance can avoid this conundrum for the most part.
I found that if participants are told at the beginning of the interview
that continuously adding less significant events to the lifegrid is not
the focal point of the study, this could be avoided. Preparing the
participants’ expectations is essential. As the interview progresses, new
anchors will inevitably be added as they are embedded in the narratives
and dates will be renegotiated in light of the other information that
surfaces over the course of the interview. Therefore, both the researcher
and participant must be prepared to make adjustments to the lifegrid.
Participants should be informed that changes to the lifegrid should be
expected and allowed. This proviso should alleviate the potential of
participants feeling offended by renegotiations of lifecourse data in light
of other information provided as the lifecourse is captured. It should
also eliminate the potential for the participant to hesitate correcting
the ‘expert’ interviewer as reported by Bell (2005).
The quality of data can be enhanced by integrating other relevant
research tools such as a semi-structured survey tool, summary boxes,
rich pictures and occupational risk maps. However, researchers should
be mindful that a substantial amount of organisation and attention is
required. Further, depending on the study type and research objective(s),
the incorporation of various other data and dated documentation such
as clinical measures, environmental data, and historical maps can
assist in enhancing the quality and the quantity of data sought. The
completed lifegrid has the ability to increase the quality of data since
it is inherently contextually driven. In this regard it can provide an
understanding of how and why things have happened in the past, and
how that past may be affecting the present.
The lifegrid is based on a temporal reference system for the
participant and researcher to use. It provides a visual representation
89
of data gaps, unlike more traditional questionnaire-based methods.

This visual depiction of the lifecourse ensures that both the researcher
and participant are referring to the same point in time, assuming that
they are both utilising the lifegrid as a reference guide throughout the
interview. Since the application of the lifegrid is a very detail oriented
and specific method it requires significant amounts of cognitive efforts
from both the participant and researcher. This could lead to lengthy
interviews, especially as the level of complexity increases (for example,
several variables of interest/columns are being captured and for instance
a long residential history is also being provided). This could also become
an issue if a lot of time is spent cross-referencing dates and/or other
information between columns.
Nevertheless, cross-referencing is an important recall strategy which
is one of the key features of the lifegrid. It allows for an internal check
of data errors, enhances participants’ memory by allowing them to
cross-reference different aspects of their lives, and it also lends itself
to increasing the quantity of data obtained. By cross-referencing,
participants can share what was occurring in their lives at a specific point
in time, recalling where they were living and working. For instance, a
participant may use a personal anchor, such as the death of their father,
to share that times were tough during that period of their life and that
they worked more hours at the foundry so that they could help pay
the bills for the big house they were living in on 51st Street. Using the
temporal reference system to cross-reference among different columns
and rows of the lifegrid allows not only for recapping, verifying and
internally checking the same data collected in different ways, but it
also assists in filling data gaps which may exist.
The completed lifegrid displays transitions and trajectories if
questions are posed properly by the researcher, and if information
such as age and certain life domains are captured (for example, asking
about life transitions such as when first left home; when completed
education; when first started working on a regular basis, etc. as denoted
in italics within Figure 5.1 are useful). These depictions can prove to
be invaluable since the researcher may then be able to decipher when
certain life transitions took place and can integrate proper probes to
explore why.
When participants speak chronologically about their residential,
educational and occupational histories, it provides insight as to when
transitions and trajectories took place. The importance of speaking
in a chronological order about different aspects of the lifecourse is
integral for several reasons. When the participant recalls information
in a manner that bounces around different dates it is tiresome for
90
them and difficult for the researcher to follow. The researcher can aid
in enhancing the participants’ memory by asking wider contextual
questions (for example, ‘what’, ‘why’, ‘how’) before attempting
to capture relevant dates (‘when’) (Yow, 1994; Berney and Blane,
2003). This technique is especially useful and may lead to interesting
discoveries. However, it may also lead to meaningless tangents irrelevant
to the study objectives and may risk a loss in participant interest. Also,
it is more challenging to revisit information and press for detail once
it has already been discussed or if the participant is constantly being
interrupted for clarification of dates. Instead, being mindful of the
time the participant wishes to devote, as well as the level of detail
required to meet the objectives of the study, the incorporation of tools
such as the ones incorporated in my study (for example, occupational
and/or residential summary boxes, rich pictures and risk maps, dated
photographs, pathology reports or medical records) can help gather
the detail necessary when discussing a specific period in time before
moving into depth in the next time period (Novogradec, 2012).
Nevertheless, the incorporation of other research tools will require
much organisation and additional effort on the part of the researcher.
Researchers will need to be well prepared and have the ability
to anticipate when further elaboration may be required; probing
as necessary while remaining attentive to narratives being told
without being distracted by which tools they will need to draw from
(Novogradec, 2012). Indeed, if an organised system is not implemented
(for example, the use of flags, proper probing throughout) there is
evidence that this could prove to be challenging for some researchers.
Used in conjunction with an interview guide, Haglund (2004) reported
that the incorporation of the lifegrid was too time consuming and
distracting and hence chose to fill out the lifegrids afterwards based
on interview transcripts.
Recall may be hindered if the participant has not provided enough
information in the first place or if they have under-reported or
forgotten certain information. I found that spousal involvement may
assist in remembering past information, but also has the potential to act
as a hindrance. Approximately 72% of the sample were males and other
research has shown that women have slightly higher recall accuracy than
their husbands (Auriat, 1993). This may have explained why spousal
involvement was helpful for the majority of cases where spouses played
a role in assisting with recall. Nonetheless, in interviewing couples
alone and together using the lifegrid, Bell (2005) reported several
discrepancies and inconsistencies which lead to confusion. One of
the most valuable resources in assisting to overcome these issues is
91
making reference to documents and/or items that have dates on them

and that may be of some relevance such as dated diaries, photographs,
medical, financial or employment records, funeral or memorial cards,
etc. (Novogradec, 2012).
The use of the lifegrid allows participants to gradually reveal pieces
of information about themselves. However, it may also assist in them
inadvertently sharing details of their lives they may not have necessarily
intended to share (for example, having a child out of wedlock). The
completion of the lifegrid provides a temporal and spatial structure
of the lifecourse. It aids in building rapport with the participant, is
a useful way of engaging the participant in the research process, and
once completed can be likened to the dynamics of completing a
jigsaw puzzle together (Anderson and Brown, 1980; Holland et al,
1999; Parry et al, 1999). I also experienced that there is an element
of surprise by the participant about the familiarity the researcher is
able to demonstrate with their lives, even though they were the ones
who initially provided the information. As a result of this, participants
may look to researchers to assist in filling in the gaps. Therefore, it
is crucial that researchers are careful not to lead the construction of
the lifegrid. Reverting to various recall strategies as well as other
documentation is necessary to avoid distorting accounts by guessing
or making assumptions (Novogradec, 2012).
The use of the lifegrid for qualitative studies
The lifegrid has also been successfully used in qualitative research (Parry
et al, 1999; Parry et al, 2002; Richardson et al, 2008; Mackichan et
al, 2013), among a younger population group, and applied in both
a reconstructed format (Wilson et al, 2007), and in its original form
(Richardson et al, 2009), emphasising the versatility of the lifegrid.
However, there have been some discrepancies in the literature as
to whether or not the lifegrid can or should be used for qualitative
interviewing.
I had little trouble obtaining rich data for my study, although the
use of supplementary tools may have aided in this regard. Richardson
et al (2009) reported that the adoption of the lifegrid offers great
potential for the exploration of health experiences within a personal and
historical context but warns that it is less useful for research objectives
interested in exploring attitudes.
Bell (2005) found that it was very difficult to phrase questions so
that they unpacked the subject’s opinions on events in their lives rather
than simply prompting a recap of the events at that time. However,
92
Wilson et al (2007) reported having a different experience and were

able to capture how young adolescents located parental substance abuse
in their narratives. Parry et al (2002) also successfully used the lifegrid
for qualitative interviews which examined smoking behaviour over
the lifecourse. It is worthwhile to mention that both Bell (2005) and
Wilson et al (2007) chose topics of a personal nature and that there
was great variation in sample size between Bell’s (2005) study (n=6)
and Wilson et al’s (2007) study (n=38). Also, Bell (2005) included a
column on the lifegrid entitled ‘relationship issues’ whereas Wilson et
al (2007) did not include ‘parental substance abuse’ on the grid. It is
hypothesised that conceivably several factors may have played a role
in Bell’s (2005) conclusions. Perhaps the integration of more general
questions or probes and supplementary tools if/when possible, and a
larger sample size may have made a difference. Also, the reconstructed
format of the lifegrid adopted by Wilson et al (2007) may have also
played a role.
Knowledge claims: narrative and historical truths

The use of the lifegrid stimulates recall in a factual and pragmatic way
(Anderson and Brown, 1980; Parry et al, 1999). This is very much in
line with the collection of historical truths that are concerned with
timing, duration and sequences of events, happenings, or place (Scott
and Alwin, 1998; Bell, 2005). Narrative truths, on the other hand,
‘are constructed around a core of facts or life events, yet allow a wide
periphery for freedom of individuality and creativity in selection,
addition to, emphasis on, and interpretation of these “remembered
facts”’ (Lieblich et al, 1998, p 8). When the application of the lifegrid

is integrated with supplementary questions and tools, participants’
stories are brought to life through memory recall which is anchored
by events and other details that are of significance to them. This recall
is often given through current mindsets where the type of narrative
is often influenced by the participant’s stage of life or state they are
in (Clausen, 1998; Scott and Alwin, 1998). Thus, researchers must
be mindful of the differences between historical truths and narrative
truths that are gathered via the lifegrid and should take measures, such
as the ones alluded to above, to ensure the accuracy of data which
reflect historical truths.
The lifegrid as a data collection tool can aid in the accurate recall
of the lifecourse. With the integration of probes, and a mixture in the
style of questioning, the researcher can draw out different types of
truths. For instance, asking questions such as ‘when did “x” happen?’
93
requests a discrete piece of information (Riessman, 2008, p 25),

and will result in the construction of the lifegrid where reference to
traumatic events are recalled in a practical way and used as a landmark.
However, posing questions such as ‘tell me what happened’ will invite
an extended account as suggested by Riessman (2008, p 25) and allows
depth to these events.
Concluding remarks
The lifegrid has been successfully used for both quantitative and
qualitative research and can capture historical and narratives truths. The
researcher must be mindful which of the knowledge claims are being
reflected by the participant and the implications these have on their
research objectives. Through the integration of various recall strategies
the extent of forgetting past events are reduced, thus increasing data
quantity. The quality of data can be enhanced with the incorporation
of other research tools relevant to the research objectives, such as, but
not limited to, a semi-structured survey tool, rich pictures, occupational
risk maps, pathology and other medical reports, clinical, employment
and environmental records, and relevant dated documents. The
lifegrid is highly versatile, aids in building rapport and can provide a
contextual understanding of the lifecourse. It also allows for a visual
representation of the lifecourse, transitions and trajectories which are
possible if the proper line of questioning is incorporated; this feature
can prove to be invaluable in lifecourse research. The temporal aspect
of the lifecourse can be accurately obtained via the lifegrid given that
various recall strategies and supplementary tools are implemented.
The lifegrid is highly recommended for use as a supplementary tool
to guide similar research.
Note
1
The author has previously published under the name Ann Novogradec.
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Part II
Space and place
SIX
Life geohistories: examining

formative experiences and
geographies
Bisola Falola
One day I followed Stephen around school as he rushed to get his

teachers to sign a permission form for a field trip to a nearby college.
As we hustled from classroom to classroom, he started to narrate his
actions:
‘I need to stop by Mr Daniels and get this form signed …

okay now to Mrs Travis, she’s the best, she helped me get
through high school …, outside, hmm no one sits here
anymore, not since freshman year, the BISA kids [arts
magnet programme] took it over … oh look, [he says
pointing to a wall lined with pictures of previous graduating
classes] 1974 that’s my grandma, that’s how long my family’s
been going here … That’s why we fought so hard keeping
Benson High open … okay around this corner, no not that
way, I never go down that hall … now to Mrs Norrell’s
room, it used to be Mrs Redmond’s room but she left us,
it was really sad …’ (Stephen)
As he recalled his high school experiences through the different places,

spaces and objects around him and, as his actions shifted in relation
to the geography around him, I realised that my current methods of
gathering young peoples’ life histories were missing these embodied
experiences of place. I was capturing participants’ key experiences in
everyday places but not how their everyday places ‘took on significance’
and drove their beliefs and actions. I needed to rethink how to
capture participants’ formative experiences as well as their formative
geographies. As a result, I started to explore methodologies that would
enable me to move from collecting life histories to exploring life
geohistories. By focusing on life geohistories, I shift attention to how
place and space exert influence over the lifecourse. The affordances and
101
constraints people encounter in and through their daily life spaces can
impact their ability to find employment and pursue careers, marry and
sustain families, and access the resources and opportunities that support
their development through different life stages and transitions. Changes
in life direction, status or identity such as leaving home, becoming a
parent, going back to school or retiring are often constituted in and
through new life spaces, and entail negotiating the social and spatial
circumstance of shifting daily geographies. In viewing life transitions
and trajectories as relationally produced with people’s lived geographies,
it becomes important to examine how the methods we use to capture
and analyse people’s biographies account for the formative nature of
space and place.
This chapter focuses on the methodological approach I used to
examine how place shapes young people’s lifecourse development. I
begin by explaining why I decided to gather young people’s life histories
and why I chose to use oral and visual narrative methods. I then explain
the benefits of these methods by using examples to draw attention to
their most useful aspects for lifecourse research. From here, I discuss the
limitations of this approach and outline why I shifted from life history
interviews to gathering and analysing life geohistories. Then, I discuss
the reasons for this theoretical and methodological shift via a critique
of the temporal hegemony of biographical narratives. I conclude by
outlining how life geohistories can serve as both a methodological
approach and a conceptual tool for spatialising lifecourse research by
exploring the challenges and opportunities offered by this framework.
Narrating and mapping life histories

In 2012, I began two research projects that focused on examining
the relationship between place and young people’s life trajectories.
Both projects were conducted with African American and Latino/a
youth (9–22 years old) in environments marked by marginalisation
and socioeconomic disadvantages. One project examined the process
of becoming a high school senior at Benson High, while the other
examined the process of growing up in the Cathedral Court Terraces,
a low-income public housing community in South Benson, US.1 In
order to examine how their everyday experiences in and of place shaped
their aspirations and lifecourse development, I conducted participant
observations and gathered their life histories.
Life histories, encompassed within biographical narratives,2 are stories
that convey the evolution and meaning of the narrator’s life. In telling
this narrative, the narrator organises his/her life events into a story
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Life geohistories
that expresses how s/he developed in relation to social structures and

the circumstances of his/her needs and desires (Fischer, 1991; Linde,
1993). As a result, the biographical narratives people tell can be used
to examine how they make meaning of their lives, understand the
significance of past choices and events, and negotiate societal structures
and transformations (Elder, 1998; Elder and Giele, 2009).
I gathered participants’ life histories by pairing oral narrative
interviews with visual methods of eliciting biographical narratives
such as through mapping and participatory diagramming. During
the interviews, I asked participants to tell me about their journey
through high school3 and childhood (for example, ‘tell me your story
of becoming a senior from when you started as a freshmen to where
you are now’; ‘tell me the story of your life here at the Cathedral Court
Terraces, from when you first moved in to now’). I then used narrative
prompting methods to encourage them to share more detailed stories
about particular experiences (Chamberlayne et al, 2000; Wengraf,
2001). I also prompted participants to discuss their experiences through
mapping in order to examine how their interactions in everyday places
influenced their actions and beliefs.
Mapping, as a biographical approach, has been used to examine how
people conceptualise their life spaces and represent their lifecourse
over time and space (Pain, 2004; Worth, 2011; Futch and Fine, 2014).
Through the process of mapping, the narrator is prompted to interpret
his/her map and explain its significance. As a result, the researcher is
able to explore how participants situate themselves in relation to their
life spaces and engage participants in a tangible discussion about how
they perceive their lived geographies. Mapping, as a narrative and
dialogical approach, can therefore generate deep conversations about
‘how a person moves through space, changes and is changed by space,
and then how space can be embodied, metabolized and carried over
time within a person’ (Futch and Fine, 2014, p 53).
Mapping, as a narrative and geographical tool, documents how
people’s activities unfold over time and space. While not used in
my research, cartographically accurate approaches such as GIS and
grounded visualisation can also be used to map participants’ everyday
experiences. In these approaches, people’s experiences are geocoded
and then visually related to a geographic context. The cartographic
visualisation allows the participant (and researcher) to examine their
spatially motivated behaviours (Kwan, 2008; Kwan and Ding, 2008;
Wiebe and Branas, 2011; Boschmann and Cubbon, 2014). Through
the process, participants gain the opportunity to re-examine, interpret,
and make meaning of their spatialised lives.
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For my research projects, I used visual narrative methods to explore

how participants’ everyday surroundings structured their experiences
and key turning points. Participants engaged in one or all of the
following: 1) mapped their everyday places and use the map to narrate
their journey through high school or childhood; 2) created life maps
and charted the key events, places and people that shaped their
lifecourse transitions (Thomson et al, 2002; Worth, 2011; Bagnoli,
2009); and 3) created life-line charts to discuss their future pathways
and imagined adulthood at different points in time and space (for
example, ‘in 5, 10, 20 years, where will you be living, going to school,
working?’) (Thomson and Holland, 2002).
The combination of these narrative approaches proved useful in
uncovering significant events and places as well as how participants
perceived their everyday geography. Roxanne’s map of her ‘day in
the life’, for example, revealed how the stress of working two jobs
and going to school influenced her perception of home as a place of
relief and rejuvenation. But her home, marked with question marks
(see Figure 6.1), is also a conflicted space of support. It does not
emotionally provide her everything she needs so she tries to find places
that address this gap:
‘home, that’s where I start and where I finish … so that’s

where I learned everything, that’s where I got it from, if
something happens after I leave I don’t have to think about
it till I come back. Everything happens in between these
two places [leaving and coming back home] and this place
[home] is the same thing. … [and] I go to the lake every
night … to hang out, think, zone out.’ (Roxanne)
Roxanne’s interpretations of her map revealed how the experiences

and emotions from one location spill over into the next, shifting how
she aims to use her daily life spaces to support her wellbeing and plan
her next steps, both short and long term. Her everyday surroundings
function as a closed loop system where she strives to balance, restore
and preserve the affective balance of her daily geography.
These methods also generated insights into the obstacles young
people identified as limiting their lifecourse development. The process
of mapping prompted many participants to reflect on the meaning
of their spatial mobility and the level of their spatial extensibility or
entrapment:
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Life geohistories
Figure 6.1: Roxanne’s map
‘My days really do change, sometimes my day would just be

me eating, watching TV, maybe pass out, maybe eat some
more. Like sometimes I’ll stay at home like all day. But
there’ll be days where I do … active things (chuckles), but
now I don’t have anything productive besides homework
and it’s not even homework, I just gotta go to class and
read. [You’re trying to say you don’t do enough.] Yeah,
I feel like, I feel like I’m not gonna be doing enough …
like you know, I wish I had a job, I do think about that
sometimes …’ (Lexi)
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For Lexi (see Figure 6.2), the map of daily life spaces represented her
daily activities and thus what she was doing with her life. This map
was therefore a reflection of the status and potential of her biographical
development, which she viewed as limited and stuck in place. This
discussion about spatial mobility as a reflection of lifecourse progress
or stasis very well may not have been uncovered without the mapping
process.
Figure 6.2: Lexi’s map
Based on my participant observations at the high school and

community, I also came to realise that these interviews were
documenting a particular slice of participants’ experiences in and
of place. More specifically, the interviews were not capturing how
participants inhabited their everyday places and the schemata of
meaning they used to negotiate their everyday geography. I began to
wonder what kinds of information about place biographical narratives
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Life geohistories
elicit and occlude. And second, I wondered if biographical narratives

capture the significance of place (for example, from examining key
turning points to influential places) or if these narratives were instead
using space and place to represent time, where place was signifying
key turning points rather than capturing the spatial contingencies of
daily to lifecourse changes.
Biographical narratives: temporalising lived experiences

The assertion that narratives privilege time over space is neither new
(Herman, 2001; Herman et al, 2005; Ryan, 2014), nor my main point
of concern. Rather, I want to understand how the temporal mechanics
of biographical narratives influence what the narrator and researcher
are able to uncover about the spatialities that shape people’s lifecourse
development. In this section, I first examine the cultural specificity
and temporal structure of biographies. I then discuss how this narrative
structure positions space and place as a setting and the antithesis of
action, and outline how this perception can limit our understanding
of the relationship between place and life trajectories.
In telling our life histories, we impose a narrative order and way of
knowing on our lived experience (Bruner, 1988). We translate our
continuous experience over time and space into key events, then select
and sequence those events based on culturally accepted notions of
what counts as a tellable life story (Habermas and Bluck, 2000; Wang
and Brockmeier, 2002). In the Western convention, narrating one’s
biography entails talking about the self as a protagonist, discussing
key life stages and social markers (for example, childhood, education,
marriage, career), including cause and effect sequences such as
epiphanies and turning points, and tracing current outcomes to earlier
experiences (Polanyi, 1989; McAdams, 2008). These narratives about
personal change over time also draw on dominant plotlines. Western
life stories are often told through themes of struggle over conflict, the
quest to achieve the good life and journeys of redemption or self-
fulfilment or of decline versus continual lifetime progress. Biographical
narratives, therefore, frame lived experiences into a culturally relevant
genre of stories guided by a chronological causality (Polkinghorne,
1995; Chamberlayne et al, 2000; Czarniawska, 2004). As a result,
the telling of one’s life history becomes a point where narrativity and
lived experience are fused via a constructed temporality. The narrated
self therefore becomes an ‘expression of a person’s existence through
time’ (Polkinghorne, 1988, p 134). If lifecourse changes are narrated,
107
interpreted and given meaning through time, then what role is given
to place?
In narrating life histories, place supports time by describing the setting
where action happens. The description of place, however, should not
distract from the story or prevent the reader from understanding the
chronological flow of events (Ronen, 1986; Herman et al, 2005;
Ryan, 2014). Place is minimally described and also translated from a
world that exists simultaneously into a ‘medium structured in time’
(Zoran, 1984, p 312). This temporal release of spatial information
(for example, describing a neighbourhood) makes it difficult for the
audience to build a mental map of spatial relations. It limits the listener’s
ability to understand and imagine the geography of the narrator’s lived
experience. Gaps in representing the dynamic experience of place
accumulate from how the narrator translates her lived experiences to
what the listener or the researcher is able to conceptualise and then
retell for others.
The narrative style and scale at which place is described can also
translate the dynamic of lived place into a general context, or a
storyworld. Following Bakhtin (2002), a storyworld or chronotope
can be conceptualised as a specific combination of space and time,
or setting and plot, that structures the rules of a narrative. Life stories
can function as a chronotopic genre, or stories that correspond with
familiar expectations about the setting and the series of events that are
likely to occur (Keunen, 2000; McAdams, 2008). In a biographical
narrative, casting the storyworld of one’s narrative as ‘a rough inner city
neighbourhood’ can, given a few details, sufficiently describe a place and
set expectations about the type of life story to come (for example, a story
of hardship marked by triumph and escape, or a story of struggle and
entrapment). A biographical narrative told as a chronotopic genre can
couple place with plot in a way that seems explanatory but, in actuality,
lacks the information needed to understand how place structures
connections between everyday experiences and lifecourse changes.
The perception of place as setting and not plot operates through the
narrative phases, from gathering to sequencing, analysing and storying
one’s life history. In identifying what to include in one’s biography,
cultural and narrative convention encourage narrators to focus on key
events. As such, everyday places may seem irrelevant or superfluous.
Places deemed influential may actually be used to signify an important
point in time; that is, what is narrated is not the place but the before and
after life changes that the particular place represents as a point in time.
Along the same lines, research methods encourage researchers to elicit
biographical narratives by asking open-ended questions to uncover the
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Life geohistories
chronology of key events. The questions asked and the data generated
are both chronologically structured (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990;
Cortazzi, 1993; Clandinin and Connelly, 2000; Wengraf, 2001) such
that in the process of collecting biographical narratives spatial questions
are filtered through a temporal lens or translated into temporal concerns
(From: Examine how the material and social grounds of Benson High
influenced students’ journey through high school. To: Tell me the story
of your journey from being a freshmen to now).
The marginalisation of place through the narrative process further
establishes time as the interpretive force of lifecourse changes. In
narrating one’s life story, the temporal coherence of the narrative
often aligns with the biographical coherence – the chronology and
biographical development follow the same trajectory – such that the
chronology of events is endowed with analytical power. As such,
understanding the chronology of the story becomes the way to examine
the cause and effect of life outcomes. This equation of chronology
with causality, however, is often an illusion (Crites, 1986; Sandelowski,
1991) that needs to be resisted in order to truly account for the drivers
of lifecourse change (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990). In other words,
focusing on how and why lifecourse shifts transpire is not simply a
function of time or even of chronology. Instead, the importance of
the narrative lies in examining the passage of one state to another.
Understanding the reason events become linked – the plot – rather than
the chronology is what makes a biographical narrative a meaningful
story of one’s life (Ricoeur, 1980, p 171). In this view, place becomes
central to the gathering and analysing of biographical narratives, as an
active driver of lifecourse changes and as a narrative element that via
the plot can convey changes in a person’s biography.
In order to effectively plot participants’ life histories, lifecourse
research methods should help participants to recall the range of
experiences, events, moments and emotions that mattered in everyday
life (Horton and Kraftl, 2006), and describe through multiple senses
how those experiences transpired within and through their everyday
geographies. The process of narrating, sequencing and interpreting
their life history should enable participants to better recall life
experiences as well as their lived geographies.
Spatialising life histories

In rethinking my methodological approach, I elicited participants’
stories of their situated and relational experience in and of place. In the
process, I incorporated walking tours or go-along interviews into the
109
project and used my participant observations to conduct more spatially

directed narrative interviews (see also Schmidt-Thomé, Chapter 9).
Walking tours involve interviewing participants while they give a tour
of their neighbourhood or go about their daily routine (Kusenbach,
2003; Hein et al, 2008; Carpiano, 2009; Evans and Jones, 2011).
Through asking questions and observing, the researcher is able to
examine how people perceive their environment and how they
give meaning to their everyday places and to themselves within it.
Since navigating familiar environments and accessing one’s personal
geography can provoke memories and embodied experiences (Ingold,
1993; Horton and Kraftl, 2006), walking tours are well suited for
examining people’s experiences over time and space, and for following
their biographical development (Marcus, 1995; Kusenbach, 2003).
For my projects, I asked participants at the high school and community
to take me on biographical walking tours. I began the walking tours
with a brief open-ended prompt, for example: ‘A lot has happened
over the past four years here. You’ve become a senior. I want you to
take me on a tour of the school and tell me about becoming a senior
here at Benson High.’ I audio recorded these individual hour-long
interviews with wireless microphones so participants and I could move
and talk more freely during the interviews. Some participants were
immediately at ease and welcomed acting as a tour guide and narrating
their experiences. Other participants took more time to become
comfortable with being visible within their everyday environment.
Walking tours, like the one conducted with Stephen, were effective
at revealing how participants inhabited their daily life spaces. The tour
created opportunities to examine participants’ embodied experience of
place and to explore the dialectical relationship between participants
and their everyday surroundings:
‘Coming into Eastside I was like so scared because, I was just

like it’s high school, everything’s different, I’m just gonna
fail all my classes, … And then I got here and it was just
open arms … It was like a family a really big family … [a
girl runs up and play hits him] … oh Jessica, friend of 14
years here, went to elementary school with her [they high
five each other] … before I wasn’t feeling school, and I was
just not coming to school … like art for me, my freshmen
year, is what got me to like open up to people, got me
more social, it got rid of basically like all the fears I had
about high school … Mrs Travis (art teacher), has grown
to become my favourite teacher, … she’s like the epitome
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Life geohistories
of what it means to be a teacher … she’s like a mentor to

me.’ Jessie, a teacher assistant sees us walking down the hall
and calls out to Stephen: ‘Do you guys realise that half of
the school year is almost over for you seniors … so are you
gonna be like the salutatorian … (well) good luck.’ ‘Thanks
Jessie,’ Stephen replies.
[We continue walking and someone jumps out at us from

the boys bathroom, screaming] … ‘that terrified me, oh my
god, I was not expecting that [the other guy is laughing]
… well, I have no idea who he was, I don’t know him …
(that’s) another thing that I really love about Benson High
… everyone is really accepting … I think everyone else
just like gets accustomed to the atmosphere of the school
and they just take it easy and go with the flow and that’s
just like how it goes …’ Mrs Page walks up to Stephen and
says: ‘Hey sorry to interrupt but just before I forget, Nancy
asked for you and she wants you to just like check in’ …
‘Okay,’ Stephen replies. (Stephen)
Through the walking tours, participants shared encounters, and

experiences that transpired within their daily life spaces. As a result, a
personal geography of their experiences and emotions began to take
shape:
‘… like almost every single spot in this complex [has a

memory] like, right here this was our … second family
type of thing … and we’d come over here a whole lot cuz
[because] we’d like to get away from our parents … oh
and right up this hill there’s a spot you can skip [school] at
or that, that I’ve seen kids skip [school] at … over there is
the Y … Mrs Patrice, who worked at the Y, she was extra
cool … like everybody used to go to her about everything,
myself, cuz I had a lot, a lot, a lot of stress and a lot of uh
problems and anger … she’s actually one of the people that
inspired me to want to work with kids.’
‘… I had friends that we would chill … Then I had some

friends that we was like some rebels, we liked to do a lot of
crazy stuff like over here by the Center … one day we took
the road block signs and put ’em on the streets … and we
would laugh our butt off [as cars stopped]. And this other
111
one time, on this same hill, I just bought these airsoft guns
… [These] steps right over here is like a good [spot], a lot
of kids used to skip over here.’
‘Pretty much when I came [here], it was a whole different

playing field from my hometown … [it was] kinda rough,
there was a lot of fights … I remember there was these two
kids I knew … like their family lived up the hill … and the
other family lived down here … both these families were
like beefing hard … you better not be friends with this
side or this side, cuz if you’re friends with them, you better
stay up there … when I first came [here], I did not come
outside for a whole year …’ ‘What got you out?’ I asked
him. ‘Remember I told you the first year of high school
when I moved [here] … I started skipping a lot, and then
it made it to where I got around, and made it to where I
started coming outside.’ (Brandon)
Brandon’s walking tour, and the personal geography it fleshed out,

brimmed with opportunities to examine his lifecourse development
and ask questions about his decisions and actions, speculate about the
trajectories that may have developed, and explore how his experiences
and beliefs changed in relation to his everyday geography.
Walking tours also helped to reveal contradictions and omissions
that may prove fruitful for analysis (for example, asking Brandon
about his reluctance to identify himself as someone who skipped
school, and why he linked skipping with becoming more familiar
with the neighbourhood). With walking tours, participants can still
engage in self preservation and exclude particular places, events and
emotions. The act of walking within familiar landscapes, however,
also encourages participants to spontaneously share stories and narrate
a flow of experience. This flow of narration also means that the data
generated may contain more information than approaches that focus
primarily on gathering key events and turning points. This, however,
may even be beneficial as knowing what information is significant may
not be clear in the beginning of a project.
In developing and rethinking my methodological approach, I
modified how I collected oral and visual narratives. I primarily used my
observations to ask questions that captured more facets of participants’
experience of place and identify when space and place were influencing
their actions. For example, I could examine participants maps and
narratives in a more spatially nuanced manner and ask targeted, ‘insider’
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Life geohistories
follow-up questions (such as ‘why do you only stay down the hill?’,
‘what do you remember about walking down the 600 hallway?’). As
a result, I could now use the interviews to ask questions about how
participants and inhabited their daily life spaces.
Towards life geohistories methodology

Life geohistories, as a methodological and conceptual framework,
aims to examine what we can learn about people’s lives and lifecourse
through place and through examining the narratives of their personal
geographies. The spaces and places people experience shapes their
lifecourse, as it guides the formation of early life identities, aspirations
and expectations, and as it impacts the opportunities and constraints
people encounter as well as how they navigate these life events and
turning points. Because space and place exert influence over the
lifecourse (Hörschelmann, 2011), examining life geohistories can reveal
how and why some people are able to take advantage of their personal
geographies, and enable researchers to better examine how biographies
become constructed as people negotiate the social and spatial
circumstances of their daily life spaces. This approach of capturing life
geohistories, therefore, seeks to recover and equally privilege space in
the narration, interpretation and analysis of biographical narratives. The
goal of using life geohistories is to thus construct personal geographies
as a way to capture participants’ experiences in and of place, generate
spatialised data for narrative analysis, engage participants in analysing
this data and as a result generate geographically grounded stories of
their life history.
Personal geographies can be thought of as the situated experiences
and emotions participants have accumulated over time and space.
Constructing these personal geographies entails gathering different
aspects of participants’ locational experiences: this ranges from their
encounters in everyday places and their spatial practices to their
embodied and affective experience of place and their perceptions of
place. Methods such as mapping, participatory diagrams, qualitative
GIS and walking tours, which gather locational experiences, can be
used in constructing participants’ personal geographies in the form
of life geohistories. Narrative techniques that capture participants’
space–time data also apply, along with other forms of oral and visual
narrative techniques that can be paired with the methods listed (Table
6.1). The resulting ‘map’ of a participant’s personal geographies can
be cartographically accurate or be more spatially inflected. Table 6.1
113
Table 6.1: Constructing personal geographies: methods for gathering locational

experiences and space–time data
Cartographic maps Qualitative GIS

Participatory GIS
Sketch maps
Participatory diagrams Mental mapping
and maps Life maps
Relief maps (intersectional analysis)
Narrative interviews Walking tours, go-along interviews
Photoelicitation, photovoice
Space–time data Digital diaries, audio diaries, activity journals
tracking Mobile phone tracking and surveys
Social network and information and communications
technology (ICT) data
shows how these methods can be used by themselves or combined as

part of an integrative approach to gathering life geohistories.
It is important to note that this approach does not view place as a
static container of a personal history or as a landscape that is filled with
meaning that can be accessed and duplicated as it is or once was (Ingold,
1993; Crang and Travlou, 2001). Rather, it views place as holding ‘the
key to discovering meaning’ (Ingold, 1993). This approach, therefore,
aims to find ways to situate people in relation to their lived geographies
‘such that meaning can be discovered’ and they can provide grounded,
relational accounts of their experiences. If, as Ricoeur (2000) asserts,
the ability to examine our past and tell our life histories ‘begins with
memory, not history’ (cf Hannoum, 2005), then finding ways to help
participants to recall and construct their personal geographies is an
important task of lifecourse research.
Eliciting life geohistories entails shifting from analysing narratives,
where methods gather fully formed, cohesive narratives as data, to
conducting narrative analysis. Narrative analysis involves gathering
events and experiences as data, integrating the events into meaningful
sequences, and producing stories as the outcome (Polkinghorne, 1995).
The goal of narrative analysis, which seeks to examine ‘how and why a
particular outcome came about’, mirrors the aims of lifecourse research.
Guiding participants through interpreting their personal geographies
and paying attention to how they resolve contradictions, what they
omit and explain away, may enable us to better understand what drove
their particular trajectories as well as what did not matter. Although
constructing narratives from data opens up questions about authorship,
having the participants narrate and interpret their life experiences is,
in large part, what makes biographical narratives meaningful. As a
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Life geohistories
result, participants should be involved in narratively analysing their

personal geographies.
Life geohistories methodology

Collecting and analysing life geohistories raises fundamental questions
about how geographic narratives are conceptualised as a narrative
process and a methodological approach. Efforts to write geographic
narratives (Cole, 2012, 2014; Sebald, 1997), which narrate a character’s
life and life experiences across place, are often viewed as fragmentary,
disconnected and as pre-narratives. The more spatial coherence
becomes a guiding factor, the more the work is said to have limited
narrativity (Azaryahu and Foote, 2008; Corrigan, 2014). In this
view, geographical narratives lack a clear sequence of events and an
explanation of how disparate events are related. As a result, when
applied to biographical narratives, they do not, and perhaps cannot,
provide entirely cohesive accounts of lifecourse changes.
But Western biographies were not formerly coherent and fully
formed. The cultural convention of narrating biographies has shifted
from being related as incomplete streams of consciousness to a format
where events are sequenced, unified under a single plot, and move
towards to a final state. Additionally, being presented with a biographical
narrative that does not explain the meaning and significance behind key
events does not mean that the narrative lacks a plot or a casual chain
of events. The rationale for what caused a change in the character’s
state and the sequence of events that matter may be contained in a
series of emplotted episodes (Bertaux and Kohli, 1984) or may be
told through ‘small stories’ that are presented as part of a trajectory of
interactions (Georgakopoulou, 2006; Bamberg and Georgakopoulou,
2008). Rather than relying on an overarching storyline, the themes that
emerge from the episodic stories are what convey the meaning of the
story (given that we as the audience look for it). As such biographies,
as geographical narratives, may take the form of open-ended narratives
held together by themes and relational connections. These connections
can be viewed through multiple trajectories – much like the lifecourse
these narratives aim to capture. The question then becomes not
whether geographic narratives are fully coherent narratives, but rather
how we should understand and analyse a narrative that is told through
a geographic arc.
The analysis of geographic narratives presents another key area of
challenge: how to evaluate the impact of place on life trajectories. This
evaluation must consider the spatial scale of analysis and how place will
115
be re-storied or narrated since the end result of this analytical process

is a(nother) narrative. Answering these questions may lead to the
following narrative analysis approaches: 1) analyse the individual places
within a participant’s personal geography, identify the positive and
negative impacts of those places, and determine their characteristics; 2)
associate each turning point of a person’s lifecourse with an influential
place or spatial practice (the scale of analysis would depend on the
events being analysed, as the aim of this approach is to situate life events
in the particular contexts (space-times) that shaped and were shaped
by those experiences; analysis of significant life experiences would
therefore always be associated with a defined and causal space-time);
or 3) examine a participant’s geographies as a unique assemblage. This
approach aims to identify how geographies, as networks of social and
spatial interrelations, impact participants’ biographical development. It
focuses on examining how changes in everyday places or in people’s
actions and beliefs can shift their daily geography and, therefore, propel
new possibilities. Thus, examining the influence of multiple contexts
and tracing shifts in geographic assemblages is important to analysing
the spatial drivers of life trajectories.
In capturing life geohistories we are examining how place becomes
significant to lifecourse development. At the same time, by determining
the scale of analysis and narrative approach, we are, in part, deciding
which places or geographies are privileged and are helping to shape
how place is understood as a driver of lifecourse processes. These
methodological and theoretical implications also have social and
political ramifications.
A wide range of US place-based programmes have been proposed
as ways to improve the life prospects of urban minority youth (such
as Promise Neighborhoods, Choice Neighborhoods, Moving to
Opportunity program, Harlem Children’s Zone). These policies,
however, are divided along the same lines as the questions outlined
above (Tough, 2009; Moore et al, 2009; Anthony and UNICEF,
2012; Gennetian et al, 2012). Some policies argue for programmes
focused at the home scale while others aim to make interventions
at the school, community or city scale. Efforts to collect geographic
indicators of lifecourse progress, mainly for youth, are also divided
among: a) approaches that favour examining places found to be at
risk and prone to limiting peoples’ future prospects; b) approaches
that identify the perceived pathways that lead to upward or downward
social mobility; and c) approaches that attempt to determine how to
create environments that support young people’s development and
future life prospects.
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Life geohistories
Lifecourse researchers are well positioned to address these challenges

of understanding how place impacts life trajectories. However, in order
for lifecourse studies to influence these place-based policies and provide
normative guidance, the issues raised above must be considered and
addressed through the course of empirical research.
Conclusion
Biographical narratives, ‘as a special practice and form of temporalisation’
(Chamberlayne et al, 2000), impact how place is presented in life
stories and how place is, therefore, viewed in relation to lifecourse
changes. More specifically, the privileging of time and chronology,
as well as the positioning of place as setting and the antithesis of plot,
flattens lived geographies into particular representations of place.
These representations occlude the embodied and relational dimensions
of participants’ experiences in everyday places, and the dialectical
and shifting relationship between participants and their everyday
geographies. This, as a result, diminishes the narrator’s ability to account
for how everyday places influenced the biographical development.
Methodologically, it also skews analysis towards examining perceptions
of place and influential places at the expense of understanding the
process of how place and everyday geographies take on significance
and become formative as they shape and shift lifecourse development.
Addressing the temporal bias of biographical narratives presents an
opportunity to develop narrative techniques that elicit life histories
from a geographical or space–time perspective. Methods, such as life
geohistories, that aim to spatialise lifecourse research enable narrators to
better recall and account for multiple dimensions of their experiences
in and of place, focus on gathering the accumulation of experiences
and life events that comprise participants’ personal geographies, and
examine ways of generating biographies as the outcome of narrative
analysis. This approach, in being well suited to explore multiple
trajectories and branching pathways, also enables researchers to better
examine the factors that link early experiences to future decisions and
life outcomes.
Engaging participants in analysing their lives through their personal
geographies may also help create geographic counter stories, which,
for marginalised groups, are narratives that aim to use their complex
experiences of place as a way to counter the dominant, often single-
storied, linkage between their life spaces and projections of diminished
or limited life trajectories. Geographic counter stories, by opening up
different approaches to viewing and telling narratives of place, can lead
117
to new ways of imagining and analysing life histories and lifecourse

trajectories. In other words, the process of constructing a biography, as
an act of generating a story about ‘who I am and how I got that way’
is also a practice of self legitimation. The ability to examine different
kinds of stories, take different perspectives in analysing one’s life, and
re-story one’s life, can therefore facilitate the process of narrative
recovery and coping and coming to terms with one’s biography and
lifecourse (Pennebaker and Seagal, 1999; Pennebaker, 2000; McAdams,
2008; Bernasconi, 2008). For marginalised populations, the ability
to examine one’s lifecourse through telling their own narratives of
place and examining their personal geographies supports the process
of constructing self understandings that better account for their lived
realities and the telling of lifecourse stories that include the effects of
broader societal and spatial structures.
Additionally, this process of eliciting life geohistories, by linking
participants’ spatial practices with their lifecourse, may also enable
researchers to advance more grounded narratives about how spatial
immobility and entrapment influences the lives of marginalised people.
Rather than viewing their lives and geographies as shaped within
fixed contexts of immobility and entrapment, examining the life
geohistories of marginalised groups can reveal the mix of mobilities
created as they negotiated their everyday geographies as well as the
social and spatial extensibilities that may have shifted and helped to
improve their lifecourse.
Lastly, this effort to spatialise lifecourse research through rethinking
the process of collecting and analysing biographical narratives is
based on challenging the idea that self understanding and biographic
understanding derive from temporality and from knowing ourselves
through time. It instead calls for theories and methods that can
advance our ability to understand ourselves and examine our lives and
lifecourse through place, through our lived geographies, and through
the development and analysis of life geohistories.
Notes
1
The names of the city, neighbourhoods, communities and schools included in this
chapter are fictitious in order to protect the anonymity of participants.
2
In this chapter, life histories are viewed within the context of biographical narratives,
but biographies, autobiographies, life histories and life or personal stories can be further
differentiated by their theoretical origins and methodological merits. This group of
narratives, however, are similarly structured by their distinct use of narrative as a way
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Life geohistories
to understand people’s experiences in everyday contexts and by the rules that govern
how these stories are told and related to lived experiences.
3
High school, in this chapter, consists of the 9th through to the 12th year of an
American student’s education. A typically freshmen in high school (9th grade) is 14
or 15 years old. A graduating senior is typically 17 to 18 years old.
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SEVEN
Using mapmaking to research the

geographies of young children
affected by political violence
Bree Akesson
Introduction
Mapmaking can be a process by which individuals orient themselves
and navigate from place to place. The process of mapmaking can
also be used as a tool for understanding one’s sense of place. The
mapmaking experience is rooted in what Sobel (1998, p 5) identifies
as ‘our visual, kinesthetic, and emotional experiences’. As a visual
method, mapmaking provides one example of how individuals engage
with place. Individuals throughout the lifecourse – from young
children to ageing adults – influence and are influenced by place.
And in order to better understand individuals’ experience with place,
research methodologies have increasingly turned to visual methods. For
example, the burgeoning field of children’s geographies has pioneered
visual methodologies in order to understand the emplaced experiences
of children in a variety of contexts.
In this chapter, I focus on mapmaking as a promising method in
lifecourse research, specifically illustrating how I have used it in research
to investigate young children’s personal geographies.1 As defined by
Blaut and colleagues (2003, p 165), mapmaking is the process by
which one creates a text ‘that represent a geographical landscape in
the traditional map-like way, reduced in scale and depicted as though
viewed from overhead’. However, for young children, a map may be
more broadly conceptualised as a drawing that depicts spaces and places.
The process of mapmaking is especially relevant for a methodological
exploration of place, because maps represent an epistemological process
– how one sees the world and one’s place within it.
Sobel (1998, p 3) notes that mapmaking is an ‘inherent human
endeavor’ for a range of ages and stages from the young child to the
older adult: ‘Just as the young child has an innate tendency to learn to
123
speak and count and sing and draw, the child also has a tendency to
make maps’. Indeed, maps, in their many forms, are one of the earliest
forms of visual information (Wood, 1992). Furthermore, because of
their visual nature, maps are easily accessible to children. Berger’s (1990)
notion that ‘Seeing comes before words … and establishes our place
in the surrounding world’ confirms the importance of the visual in
the early stages of the lifecourse.
Pink (2007) notes that, in order to understand any research project,
one must understand the relationship between theory and method.
Therefore, I will first develop the relationship between theory
and method by describing the main theoretical underpinnings for
considering mapmaking as a methodology for research with young
children affected by political violence. Then I will discuss mapmaking as
a participatory methodological approach to investigate young children’s
experiences and describe research that aims to better understand
young children’s mapmaking abilities. I follow this by exploring why
mapmaking is a viable methodology with young children and how
maps and mapmaking should be analysed in the context of research
with young children.
Theoretical underpinnings
First, I acknowledge the ideas expressed by the field of children’s

geographies, which views children as a source of knowledge about
their own lives and environments (van Blerkand et al, 2009). Rather
than passive subjects, young children are constantly negotiating
and reconstructing their environments in profound ways. This is
supported by Langsted’s (1994) view of children as experts in the own
lives and Qvortrup and colleagues’ (1994, p 2) view of ‘children as
beings, not becomings’. However, for children in settings of political
violence, these conceptualisations of childhood are often eclipsed by
a deficits-based approach to research. Furthermore, young children’s
roles in conflict are often overgeneralised. For example, children in
settings of political violence have been portrayed as either helpless
victims of violence or future agitators of violence. Yet, these are one
dimensional depictions of children’s engagement in violent settings.
In fact, narrow representations can undermine local coping strategies
(Dawes, 2000). They also tend to overwhelm and silence the multiple
experiences and roles that young children play in political violence.
A major anthropological review article by Korbin (2003) found that
children’s voices were largely absent from the literature examining
childhood and violence. Therefore, it is important to understand
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Mapmaking with young children
young children’s lived experiences growing up amid political violence

by using methodologies that acknowledge children as a key source for
understanding the dynamics about their own lives.
This leads to my second theoretical underpinning, which emphasises
the importance of a methodological approach that empowers young
children and their families. Children – especially young children –
affected by political violence are faced with the challenge of often being
in a powerless position. Agency is difficult to come by in a place where
one fears that one’s home may be destroyed or one’s family may be taken
away. Children’s agency may be limited or restricted by their restriction
to place, which impacts on their experiences and understandings
(Gilliam, 2003). However, power is not divided equally among all
children. Some children may exercise agency, while others may not
be fully able to. For young children, their ability to exercise agency
may by limited or diminished by war and violence. Nevertheless, their
agency still exists, and research methodologies should consider ways
in which to access and enhance young children’s agency.
Third, in addition to emphasising the importance of young children
as active agents in their own lives, young children are nested in
interlocking systems of family and community. As a component of
the family and community system, they can be an important source
of knowledge about their own lives and communities. Yet at the same
time their experiences are constantly shaped and influenced by those
around them. Understanding the young child from this ecological
perspective allows for siblings, caregivers and members of the child’s
social environment to be involved in the research process. Therefore,
any research methodology should consider the ways in which children,
families and communities interact with each other, and make efforts
to gather data from these multiple sources. Using the above theoretical
underpinnings to inform my approach to mapmaking as a methodology
with young children, the following presents a discussion of mapmaking
as a methodological approach to investigate young children’s experience
in the context of political violence.
Mapmaking as participatory
Because of their position in an adult-dominated society, children

may not feel comfortable expressing their views or be taken seriously
by adults. Therefore, researchers working with children continually
struggle with how to best encourage children to express their views
by enhancing their willingness to communicate and increasing the
richness of the data (Hill, 1997). Furthermore, traditional research
125
methods with children have been criticised because they do not

consider children’s involvement in the research process (Veale, 2005).
This is especially true with research on young children and their families
living in contexts of political violence, where research participants
often occupy a passive role in the methodological process. These
traditional forms of research are based on a positivist approach, which
utilises empirical methodologies borrowed from the natural sciences
to investigate phenomena (Berg, 1998). Using a positivist lens, the
researcher objectively follows the behaviours of ‘subjects’ with tools
such as individual interviews, surveys or checklists to generate a large
quantity of data. While these studies still contribute to our growing
knowledge about war-affected children, a sole reliance on positivist
strategies leads to outcomes that do not wholly represent the complex
lived experiences of young children and their families (Boyden and
de Berry, 2004; Veale, 2005). There is, however, a place for positivist
methods when sensitively combined with other complementary
methods to provide a complete picture of young children’s lives. For
example, Leitch’s (2008) research with children in Northern Ireland has
found that narrative methodologies are made more readily accessible
by the integration of visual image making.
The use of participatory methods with young children has become of
increasing interest as a means of giving children a voice, treating them
as active agents, and recognising that they have something important
to say about the world around them. Image making processes, such
as mapmaking, engage young children holistically, creatively and
practically in an activity that connects with their ability (Anning and
Ring, 2004). Image making provides an opportunity to represent
experience, through a tangible process and product.
Participatory researchers work with participants to help them ‘define
their own reality and challenge imposed knowledge’ (Veale, 2005,
p 254). Chambers (1997) recommends that methods should shift the
balance of emphasis: from -etic to -emic, closed to open, individual
to group, verbal to visual, measuring to comparing, and extracting
information to empowering local knowledge. Then, the research
process becomes one of reflection and consensus in order ‘to stimulate
the articulation of multiple voices and positions’ (Veale, 2005, p 254).
These kinds of participatory techniques provide opportunities for
young children to express themselves in meaningful ways, while also
offering a means of empowerment and fuller participation in society
and in decision making matters that may affect them.
126
Young children as mapmakers

Due to the prevalence of popular child development theories over
the past decade, such as Piaget and Inhelder’s (1967) theory of
development of spatial cognition, it was previously assumed that
young children lacked the capacity for abstract thinking and therefore
did not have developed mapping abilities (Downs et al, 1988; Liben
and Downs, 1997). This misconception has persisted into the present
with concern that young children’s experiences are limited by their
age, and therefore anything they have to contribute to research is
based on insufficient knowledge (Boyden, 2004). Similarly, in research
with war-affected children, very few studies include young children
as research participants.
Framed by Piaget and Inhelder’s (1967) stages of child development,
researchers such as Matthews (1984) and Bell (2002) have explored
children’s spatial awareness using visual representations of place. Mental
maps and aerial photographs have been used to explore children’s
spatial development (Blaut, 1997). Blades and colleagues (1998) used
similar techniques to establish similarities in mapmaking abilities
among young children across cultures. And several researchers have
found that young children have significant mapmaking abilities (Blades
et al., 1998; Blaut, 1997; Blaut and Stea, 1971; Blautand et al, 1970;
Blaut et al, 2003; Blaut, 1991; Matthews, 1995; Matthews, 1992;
Matthews, 1987; Mitchell, 1934; Plesterand et al, 2002; Sowdenand
et al, 1996). Sitskoorn and Smitsman (1995) found that infants as
young as six-months-old have spatial awareness around them and can
construct knowledge based on their experiences. Hancock and Gillen’s
(2007) cross-cultural research revealed that two-year-old children
understand and invest meaning in domestic places. Similarly, Gallacher
(2005) determined that two- and three-year-olds are able to creatively
negotiate space and time. Blaut et al (2003) have found that children
aged 3–5 years are able to interpret aerial photographs and simple maps.
The implications of this work are important. As Blaut and colleagues
point out, pre-literate children can, because of their proven ability
to understand visual representations, be exposed to a rich breadth of
information at a young age. Therefore, children are more competent
than conventional Piagetian models of childhood suggest.
Pearce (1977) describes children as being firmly established within
the mother–family matrix until age four, and so these systems greatly
influence a young child’s map of the world. From ages four to seven
the child begins to explore the world beyond the home (Sobel, 1998).
But this may vary by culture, where children are out on the street at
127
an early age, being looked after by an older sibling and other children
in the neighbourhood (Rogoff, 2003). Studies show that children
as young as four years from various cultures have mapping abilities
including the perceptual and scale interpretation abilities to read and
understand simple maps (Blades et al, 1998). At the ages of five and
six, children are still engaged in the early childhood processes and their
world is small, contained and dominated by the senses:
The right hemispheric mode of spatial and visual perception

dominates, and feelings and pictures are main forces in
the organisation of the child’s world. The houses, trees,
and animals are faces in the landscape that carry a certain
emotional valence and their ‘look’ needs to be preserved
along with the relationship between the child and the
aspects of his or her surroundings. (Sobel, 1998, p 21)
These elements become part of a child’s personal geography.

In his cross-cultural research to learn more about how children
engage in placemaking at different ages and stages, Sobel (1998)
found that young children often identify with the place that is most
important to them, and for young children, the place they most
value is home. For example, in my research with Palestinian children
and families exploring the concept and meaning of place (Akesson,
2014a), children’s homes dominated their maps of their neighbourhood
communities (see Figure 7.1 for four examples from different children).
The home was often located in the centre of the paper, taking up the
majority of the space. Even if other homes were in close proximity,
the children often focused on drawing only their own home.
As children develop, their maps becoming neighbourhood maps
incorporating dimensionality, pathways and meaningful places. In
other words, as children’s awareness of space broadens so do their visual
depictions of place. The following section will look more closely at
the existing research that use mapmaking with children, and identify
common elements, as well as the rewards and challenges, that support
this as a viable methodology for young children and their families
affected by political violence.
128
Figure 7.1: Four examples of ‘home’ drawn by children
Why mapmaking works in research with young children

Positivist methods of information gathering tend to focus on extraction
techniques, such as surveys and interviews (Boyden and de Berry, 2004;
Veale, 2005), which are useful in their own right. However, young
children and children who have experienced distressing events may
not be able to fully engage through these methods (De Lay, 2003).
The addition of qualitative techniques – such as mapmaking – to the
existing methodological toolbox is effective with war-affected children,
129
because these methods are versatile, adaptable and often considered

more culturally valid than a sole reliance on traditional methods of data
collection (De Lay, 2003; Hart et al, 2007). In this way, mapmaking
is an alternative approach to gain the participation of young children
in an effective, meaningful and visual way.
As an alternative approach to data collection, mapmaking provides
important and diverse data about place from young children’s
perspectives. And mapmaking can be used as a starting point for more
detailed data. This is especially useful with young children, as research
indicates that drawing helps facilitate recall (Butler et al, 1995; Gross
and Hayne, 1998; Gross et al, 2009). Using maps as a visual research
methodology can act as a prompt to encourage research participants
to reflect on their physical environments or as ‘a catalyst for oral
description’ (Young and Barrett, 2001, p 144). De Lay’s (2003) mobility
maps were used after the 1994 Rwandan genocide as a tool for family
tracing and social reintegration with young children separated from
their families. Children drew a simple picture showing people and
places visited before separation. The mobility map became the basis
for a narrative interview between the child and the worker. Through
these maps, many children were reunited with their families and local
communities. Young and Barrett (2001) found that maps (as well as
drawings) helped to facilitate discussion with children to explain the
importance of places on the maps. They conclude that the combination
of visual and oral research methods resulted in a much richer data set
than from discussion alone. Leitch’s (2008, p 39) research in Northern
Ireland encourages the dynamic combination of drawings and narrative
to frame children’s personal and social experiences: ‘Image-making
provides an opportunity to represent experience, a tangible process
and product, within which stories are inherent, or out of which stories
are (re)created’.
In my research with Palestinian children and families (Akesson,
2014b), children drew maps, which served as a prompt for more
detailed discussion of their experience of place in political violence.
Eight-year-old Salima, who lives in the small and violent space of Balata
refugee camp, drew a map of her neighbourhood community and
described as follows: “It’s school, a house, and um, … Palestinian flag
and the shop market … [and] the sun.” She then showed me another
drawing (see Figure 7.2), explaining, “It’s … the mosque and children
are fighting the tanks by throwing stones … because they are taking
our men and arresting them.”
130
Figure 7.2: Eight-year-old Salima’s map of her neighbourhood community
Salima’s description of her map prompted a discussion about the impact

of the political violence on her perception of and experiences in her
neighbourhood community. This illustrates how mapmaking can be
used as a prompt for discussions about aspects of children’s lives that
might not easily emerge in words alone.
Maps help researchers understand place from children’s perspectives,
because the process is based on children identifying spaces they
recognise as important. As a research methodology, mapmaking can
provide a diverse amount of information about young children’s
relationship with their environment. There are several examples of
mapmaking’s utility as a tool for exploring placemaking. During
research in Uganda, Young and Barrett (2001) found that mapmaking
was an important visual method for gaining insight into street children’s
perceptions of their urban environment. De Lay (2003) used mobility
maps to visually and spatially identify children’s and family’s day-to-day
activities, threats to the child’s wellbeing, and resources available to
resist those threats. Though maps vary in the type of data they produce,
these studies indicate that they produce valuable insight into children’s
relationship with place.
Finally, as a participatory research approach, mapmaking capitalises
on children’s strengths: their local knowledge of their environments,
their attention to detail, and their visual and verbal communication
skills. Mapmaking utilises these skills, playing to children’s strengths
rather than their weaknesses, which is aligned with a strengths-based
perspective in social work. These tools create a research environment
in which the children are at ease, are able to express themselves
131
freely, and do not feel the risk of giving a wrong answer (De Lay,
2003). By addressing the multitude of ways that young children
communicate, mapmaking acknowledges the diversity of children.
Clark (2004a) recognised this when she was developing the Mosaic
approach, acknowledging a need to create a methodology that moved
beyond the spoken word with young children in order to capture the
complexities of their everyday experiences. Therefore, mapmaking
can shed light on children’s geographies by recognising the diverse
experiences of childhoods and the different ways that children engage
and communicate.
Using mapmaking as a lifecourse research method

Mapmaking can (and should) be used with other research methods for
a richer understanding of individual experiences through the lifecourse.
At the same time, mapmaking can be used beyond the micro-individual
level with children’s families and communities to better understand
their sociospatial experiences. Using mapmaking in conjunction with
other methods better captures the breadth and depth of children’s
experiences than reliance on a single technique. Other visual methods
have been used successfully with children to explore their relationship
with the environment, while at the same time engaging children in the
research process. Through focus groups, photography and mapmaking,
Hart (1997; 1979) studied children’s multiple places – from the home to
the wider community – to map out the territory of childhood. Clark’s
(2004b) Mosaic approach, a multi-method approach to gain deeper
understanding of children’s relationship with their environments, used
photographs, walking tours and mapmaking to engage young children
in research about their relationship with place. Clark demonstrated that,
as visual depictions of young children’s environments, mapmaking – in
combination with other qualitative research methodologies – can help
provide a complete picture of young children’s personal geographies.
There are several practical reasons for using visual methods such
as mapmaking with other methodologies. First, a multi-method
approach allows for triangulation of results at two levels: between
different tools and between different sources of data. In their multi-
method study, Young and Barrett (2001) found that the triangulation
of data was a highly effective child-centred method when researching
children’s relation to their environment. Second, using a range of
methods provides several perspectives of young children’s views and
experiences. It allows children to communicate in different ways,
reducing the chance that they will only convey what they think
132
adults wants to hear. A multimodal approach also ensures that young

children’s personal geographies are not reduced to only one aspect
and provides a deeper understanding of how children understand and
navigate their environments. For example, in Young and Barrett’s
study, using these methods in concert ‘revealed a detailed picture of
children’s knowledge of place use and their place preferences and fears’
(pp 154–5). Combining different modes of inquiry also provides a
holistic understanding of childhood and its relation to place in the
context of political violence, while respecting children’s agency as
social actors and active participants in the creation of their own worlds
of meaning.
Analysing maps and mapmaking
The biggest challenge to the use of visual methodologies is how best to

analyse and represent the data. This is based on its supposed ambiguity
of interpretation as compared to other forms of written or verbal texts.
Critics suggest that the inherent polysemic, or multi-meaning, nature of
visual material creates a more subjective analysis, which is problematic
among certain research traditions. When working with visual data – and
especially when working with children’s visual representations – one
should be willing to allow for polysemy, whether during data collection
or during the presentation of results. In this way, mapmaking allows
for a variety of analytical paradigms and explorations.
In Psathas’s (1979) study of mapmaking, he found that human-drawn
maps should not be considered geographer’s maps. In other words,
maps should not be evaluated as to whether they are drawn to scale
and bounded by the real world. Rather, they should be perceived of
as ‘maps with a purpose’, operating with a special sense of place for
the mapmaker. In other words, research that uses mapmaking as a
methodology should use ‘human interpretation as the starting point
for developing knowledge about the social world’ (Prasad, 2005, p 13).
But an additional question arises when working with children: How
much can the researcher allow children’s images to speak for themselves
such that their visual language is not reinterpreted through an adult
lens (Fielding, 2004)?
Just as there are vast forms of visual representations, there are several
ways to evaluate visual representations. Borrowing from Wright’s
(1999) approach to reading photographs, Banks (2001) suggests using
two criteria to evaluate visual images: internal narrative (content) and
external narrative (context). The internal narrative – what Wright
(1999) calls ‘looking through’ – is the story that the image communicates.
133
The external narrative – what Wright calls ‘looking behind’ – is the

social context within which the image was produced and the social
relationships that are occurring when the image is viewed. In other
words, the internal narrative is primarily for information gathering,
whereas the external narrative addresses information about the nature
of the environment beyond the visual data.
When analysing young children’s maps, one must be prudent
in reading both the internal and external narratives, while also
distinguishing between both. Banks (2001) suggests an initial reading of
the internal narrative, while considering that all visual representations
are the product of human action, ‘entangled to varying degrees in
human social relations’ (p 12). Visual data therefore may require a
wider frame of analysis – and a reading of the external narrative that
goes beyond the actual image – in order for the researcher to grasp
the complex connections between person and place. Like all visual
documents, a map has little meaning in and of itself. Rather, as
Psathas (1979) indicates, it is the interpretation and explanation from
the mapmaker that is important. In the case of using visual methods
with young children, the participants’ own explanations of why they
generated the details on the maps is what is important for the research
process. In my research with Palestinian children and families (Akesson,
2014b), seven-year-old Nadir drew the map shown in Figure 7.3.
As a researcher, I could certainly make assumptions about the map,
which in my viewpoint depicted soldiers with large guns shooting. But,
as Nadir explained, the map was much more complex, depicting nearby
mountains where there is more violence than in his neighbourhood
community. Nadir explained that even though the violence is far
away in the mountains, he is still aware of it and it affects him. My
exchange with Nadir shows that as one methodological tool to unearth
young children’s experience with place, mapmaking is not about
interpreting the maps that young children draw; rather it is about the
process of bringing young children’s knowledge to bear on the visual
representation of place.
Boyden and Ennew (1997) recommend not conducting visual
methods with children if there is no opportunity for children to explain
or interpret the images they have produced or if the researchers are not
familiar with the children’s cultural ‘ways of seeing’ (p 116). The authors
claim that visual research that fails to follow these basic procedures
cannot be called participatory, will not likely be considered scientifically
valid, and may in fact be unethical. In their study of children’s places,
Darbyshire and colleagues (2005) acknowledged that they did not create
a space for children to discuss their visual documents (photographs and
134
Figure 7.3: Seven-year-old Nadir’s map
maps), leading to an adultist approach to research. The authors reflected:

‘While a picture may indeed be worth a thousand words, we have no
doubt that the children’s thousand words would have enhanced this
aspect of the study’ (p 429).
Clark (2004a) addresses the issue of interpretation in research with
visual methodologies, not as a way to unearth one true meaning, but
rather to provide young children with multiple opportunities to express
their views and experiences. Tolfree and Woodhead (1999) describe
this process:
135
It’s not so much a matter of eliciting children’s preformed

ideas and opinions. It’s much more a question of enabling
them to explore the ways in which they perceive the world
and communicate their ideas in a way that is meaningful
to them. (p 21)
Additionally, research with children should include a reflexive

component, with researchers critically reflecting on both their role and
their assumptions (Davis, 1998), but also on their choice of methods
and their application (Punch, 2002).
Conclusion
In advocating for the use of mapmaking as a participatory visual
methodology for researching the lifecourse, I am not suggesting that
such a method is always useful or applicable or that it is without its
limitations. However, as an empowering nonverbal visual method,
mapmaking opens up multiple possibilities for working with individuals
who may not engage through traditional research methods, such as,
in the case of my research, young children and their families affected
by political violence.
To conclude, I would like to revisit the theoretical underpinnings
introduced earlier in this chapter. First, mapmaking recognises young
children as a source of knowledge about their own lives. As young
children are increasingly being recognised as meaning makers in their
own right, research methodologies should follow suit. The use of visual
methods enables researchers to investigate children’s diverse experiences
with place and to explore children’s different geographies. Indeed, there
is a great deal to learn about young children’s relationship with the
physical world. Second, mapmaking can be used as a methodological
tool to empower and increase agency, because the approach gives child
participants a voice in the research. As a participatory methodology,
mapmaking acknowledges that the child participants are in the best
position to speak about their lived experiences. Using participatory
visual approaches to empower and increase agency can be as simple
as helping young children use methods that they feel comfortable
with and which help them to communicate their experiences, when
they may not otherwise have such opportunities. Third, embracing a
social ecological approach, I believe that mapmaking can be used as a
research tool with the whole family. However, with the exception of
Boğaç’s (2009) study on place attachment among families in Cyprus,
few studies utilise mapmaking with both war-affected children and their
136
families. While there are several excellent studies that use mapmaking
with children (for example, Clark, 2004b, Dennis et al, 2009, and
Literat, 2013), no studies to date use mapmaking with young children
and their families affected by political violence. As a methodology,
mapmaking explores place by actively illustrating the relationship that
young children have with their environments. As Burke (2005, p 30)
notes, mapmaking ‘reveals meanings, feelings, and personal histories
interwoven into children’s places’. In this way, mapmaking can be a
powerful visual representation of young children’s personal geographies
and how they see their place in the world.
Note
1
Young children are defined as under the age of nine. I have chosen this age range
for two reasons: first, the majority of place-based research focuses on older children
(Derr, 2002; Hay, 1998). Second, young children are underrepresented in research
with populations affected by political violence (Hart et al, 2007).
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EIGHT
Keeping in touch:
studying the personal communities
of women in their fifties
Sophie Bowlby
Friendship, space and place

This chapter is about a research project on the friendship afforded to
women in their fifties by members of their ‘personal communities’ and
their interactions with information and communication technologies
(ICT). The research examined the informal social interactions of
women in ‘midlife’ in the context of their lifecourse trajectory to date
and their anticipations of the future. It focused, in particular, on the
time–space context of these interactions, exploring the time–space
scheduling of ‘keeping in touch’ and the real and virtual spaces within
which these social interactions took place. The empirical research was
carried out in the summer of 2013 in Swindon, UK.1 Here a ‘personal
community’ is defined as a ‘network of ties’ (Wellman, 1982, p 3) with
a group with whom a person has significant relationships of sociable
companionship and/or informal support. The group may include
both kin and non-kin members and members may not all know one
another. Its membership changes over time as people cease to be or
become significant or die (Spencer and Pahl, 2006).
The research focused on women in their fifties for three main reasons.
First, while the use of specific age limits is arbitrary, it was a simple
method for finding women in what is, for most, an important period
of transition in their lifecourse trajectory. It is a time when, for many,
the demands of childcare lessen, offering opportunities to establish new
friendships which may be valuable in later life, while care for parents
or grandchildren may become more onerous. It is also a time when
retirement is no longer distant and health worries may increase. Very
little research, apart from Airey (2005), has examined this significant
period in women’s lives.
143
Second, women in their fifties now have experienced major changes

in the opportunities open to and in social expectations of women.
Consequently most of these women will have spent significant periods
in employment and many will have experienced job change, divorce or
repartnering, which is likely to have affected the membership of their
personal communities. In these respects their experiences are different
from those of the women in their 70s and 80s whose friendships and
social support in old age have been widely studied in earlier research
(Jerrome, 1992; Qureshi and Walker, 1989; Wenger, 1991; Gray, 2009)
or of many of the women included in earlier studies of kinship and
friendship (Willmott, 1987; O’Connor, 1992; Finch and Mason, 1993).
Third, these women have spent much of their adult lives without
the new communication technologies of mobile phones, texting,
emails and social networking which are commonplace among younger
women. We know little about the impacts of these developments
on how friendship and support is practised among this cohort and
whether there are significant inequalities of access to or familiarity
with such technologies among them. It may be thought that access to
such technologies will have substantially changed the ways in which
they interact with their friends as virtual communication replaces or
augments many face-to-face encounters. Alternatively, it may be that
many or most of this cohort of women make little use of new ICT.
What then were the research questions? The research asked about
how these women’s relationships of sociable companionship and
informal support are practised over space and time. It asked how these
relationships are affected by and affect the meanings accorded to the
spaces in which they ‘take place’. The research asked whether and how
women in their fifties in England use different forms of ICT to keep
in touch with their personal community and how ICT impacts on the
nature of their relationships with kin and non-kin. It also investigated
what activities people share in different places and spaces with kin
and non-kin, and whether some women have limited access to ICT
because of a lack of information, skills or income.
These research questions were set within the broad framework of
‘caringscapes’ (Bowlby et al, 2010; Bowlby, 2012) which emphasises
that ‘caring’ activities – including the support and companionship of
friendship – take place in a diversity of temporal and spatial frames which
affect how they are organised. For example, the diverse temporalities
of bodily rhythms, of long- and short-term employment activities,
and of domestic work will affect the times available for contacting
and sharing activities with friends and kin. Varying temporalities also
are inescapably bound to diverse spatial frames and scales of activity.
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Studying the personal communities of women in their fifties
These may range from individual ‘mental maps’ of the accessibility

and desirability of different ‘real’ places or ‘virtual’ social networks, to
the mundane effects of transport networks and the spatial distribution
of consumer services, or to the varying spatial scales over which such
services are organised.
In keeping with this ‘caringscapes’ framework, the research recognised
that a woman’s personal community today will be influenced by the
placing, timing and content of the experiences and social contacts of
their earlier life. Thus the time–space patterns traced through each
woman’s activities, social contacts and economic engagements over
their lifecourse to date were likely to be important to any understanding
of the relationships in their current personal community. It was
recognised that these would be influenced by the everyday scheduling
of current activities such as employment, other caring responsibilities –
for example, care for older relatives – and domestic work. They might
also be influenced by plans for or anticipations of future changes in
such activities, such as retirement or relocation.
Researching personal communities
Research design
The research was conceived as an exploratory, qualitative investigation

of the influence of a variety of factors on the social practices involved
in friendship. As explained, there was to be a particular focus on ICT,
lifecourse trajectories, and the roles of kin and non-kin. The research
did not aim to provide a representative picture of the friendship practices
in England of women in their fifties but rather to provide some
understanding of the range of complex social relationships involved
and the factors influencing them. It was thus important to include
women from a diversity of social positions but it was not important
that they be a random, representative sample of women in their fifties.
The overall sample size was limited by the resources at our disposal
– the empirical data was to be collected over a five-month period
by two people, working part-time through one-to-one, face-to-face
qualitative interviews. With these restrictions in mind we aimed to
carry out 30 interviews.
Contacting our sample
The recruitment and interviewing were carried out by me and Caroline

Day. We had already decided to carry out the main research in Swindon,
145
a city 80 miles west of London. The choice of Swindon was partly to do

with convenience (Swindon is an easy 40 minutes’ drive from Reading
where I live, and Caroline was living in and had grown up in Swindon)
and partly to do with Swindon’s characteristics. It is an ‘ordinary’, fairly
prosperous mid-sized English town that owes its initial growth to its
development as a centre for the manufacture of railway rolling stock in
the 1840s and further growth to its designation as an Expanded Town
in the early 1950s. Today it retains some manufacturing industry –
notably Honda – but also financial services, the headquarters of a wide
range of service companies and the UK Research Councils (Bassett et
al, 1989; Bassett and Harloe, 1990). It has a generally unexceptional
socioeconomic makeup, although it has a lower than average ethnic
minority population (84.6% of the population was recorded as being
of White UK ethnicity as against 79.9% for England as a whole in
the 2011 census).
Since one research question concerned the possible impact of income
levels on access to technology we needed a sample that included both
wealthy and poor women. We chose two areas within Swindon,
aiming to carry out 15 interviews in each area. The first comprised the
prosperous ward of Old Town and Lawn (including Broome Manor)
and the second the less prosperous wards of Penhill and Pinehurst and
Gorse Hill (see Table 8.1). Although, as the table shows, the areas differ
significantly in their socioeconomic makeup, they are also internally
diverse, ensuring that the survey would include women from a wide
range of socioeconomic situations.
There are no simple methods of identifying women in their fifties to
recruit. We started recruitment in May 2013 in Penhill, Pinehurst and
Gorse Hill by contacting local community groups, putting posters and
fliers in local shops and placing a notice in a local community newsletter
whose editors kindly allowed us to advertise free of change (see Figure
8.1). Potential interviewees were promised a £30 voucher to spend
in a local supermarket, Tesco, or a department store, Debenhams, as
a thank you for taking part. We knew that we could not make much
use of snowballing since we did not want to interview women who
were part of the same friendship network – we wanted a diversity of
personal communities.
Our initial recruitment attempts were strikingly unsuccessful – the
local groups we contacted proved inappropriate – they were aimed
at older or far younger women. After nearly a month, we had four
successful responses to the newsletter advertisement and one woman
who responded to a poster but then withdrew. We decided to try
recruiting door-to-door between 5.30 p.m. and 8 p.m. on a weekday.
146
Table 8.1: Selected socioeconomic characteristics of the areas used for finding a
sample
Old Town and Gorse Hill, England

Lawn (%) Pinehurst and (%)
Penhill (%)
Higher managerial, administrative and 19.5 4.1 10.4
professional (persons)
Lower managerial, administrative and 28.9 11.8 20.9
professional (persons)
Routine occupations (persons) 5.5 20.7 11.0
Long-term unemployed (persons) 1.1 3.0 1.7
White British (persons) 85.8 85.3 79.8

One person household 65 and over 11.8 13.2 12.4
(households)
One family household all aged 65 and over 9.7 5.2 8.1
(households)
Lone parent household with dependent 3.7 10.4 7.1
children (households)
Households in Owner Occupation 70.9 46.3 63.4
(households)
Households in Social Renting (households) 7.1 40.0 17.7
Households Private Renting (households) 17.2 12.0 16.8

Source: Census 2011, Key statistics, www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk.
Both areas have well-defined housing sub-areas and we targeted a

different sub-area on each occasion. At each house we spoke to people
who answered the door, giving them a leaflet and asking if they or
anyone there was eligible and willing to arrange an interview with
us at a date convenient to them; we put leaflets through the doors
of houses when we had no answer. This method – although time
consuming – proved far more successful. We spent about 13 women
hours and recruited 18 people (13 of whom were face-to-face contacts).
Seven other people were recruited through posters or fliers in shops
or community centres. The remaining six were recruited through
snowballing (two) and, as mentioned above, the newsletter (four).
We were helped in our door-to-door recruitment by sunny weather
which put us and those we spoke to in a good mood – we had almost
no unpleasant responses and many friendly ones. Despite our overall
success we found that we had no responses from women with an ethnic
minority background from any of our methods of recruiting although
we did knock on the doors of many ethnic minority households. We
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Figure 8.1: Recruitment flier
decided not to make a special effort to recruit such women, given our
resource constraints.
What to ask? Designing the interview schedule
We proposed to use semi-structured interviews as a tried and tested

method of gaining an understanding of how people thought about
and practised their friendships. Spencer and Pahl (2006) had already
carried out a fascinating study using such interviews that explored
148
the roles of kin and non-kin in changes in friendship over time. They
asked their respondents to place people ‘important to them’ on a ‘map’
of three concentric circles, with the most important people at the
centre and the least important in an outer circle (see Figure 8.2 for
a diagrammatic representation of one respondent’s map). Subsequent
studies of friendship had also used this approach (Roseneil, 2006).
We also decided to use such a map and adapted Spencer and Pahl’s
interview schedule to focus on issues of place and use of ICT rather
than on changes in friendship over time.
Figure 8.2: Diagrammatic representation of Charlotte’s personal community map2
Family
Friend
We followed their procedure and sent interviewees a letter before

the interview enclosing a sheet of 21 stickers and asking them to list
on each one ‘people who are important to you now – these could be
family, friends, neighbours, a partner or spouse, or people you work
with’. They were asked to put people’s ages, how far away they lived
and – for non-family members – how they met (for example, ‘school’
or ‘friend of a friend’) on each sticker. We also asked them to fill in
three tables – the first two asked for details of people currently living
in their household and of any children not in the household. In order
to gain some information about their lifecourse the third table asked
them to ‘fill out the Table below with details of what you feel were
important changes in your life, and whether these involved a change in
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where you lived and what sort of paid or unpaid work or education/
training you were doing’.
In the interview we then asked them to place the stickers on the ‘map’.
We then planned to select three friends and three family members and
to ask them to tell us in more detail about their relationship with these
six people; how they kept in contact with them and whether, how and
where they had face-to-face meetings; the support and companionship
they provided and the types of activities they shared in different places.
We also asked them to discuss the meaning of friendship, to compare the
different ways they kept in touch with people, to compare relationships
with family and friends and to talk about who they would turn to for
specific types of help or advice. We piloted the first draft of the survey
in Reading and made several modifications, including adding further
questions about friends made at work and about neighbouring.
We did not anticipate that the interviews would raise many ethical
issues. Participants were guaranteed anonymity; they were told they
did not have to answer any questions they did not wish to answer and
could withdraw from the research at any time. They were offered the
opportunity to receive a summary of the findings (which everyone asked
for). The interview schedule was approved by the Ethics Committee
of the School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Science
at Reading University. However, significant ethical issues concerning
the analysis and interpretations of the results became apparent as the
research progressed and these are discussed later.
The interviews went broadly as planned. The shortest was 43 minutes
and the longest 3 hours. Four people did not fill out the stickers
or questionnaire in advance but we were able to cover the relevant
material during the interview. Most interviewees listed between 10 and
16 people in their personal community although some named as few
as 4 and a few named well over 20 (the largest personal community
had 29 members). In the event we rarely limited the discussion about
ways of keeping in touch to six people since interviewees talked to us
about their contacts with and feelings about each person as they put
the stickers on the map. Sometimes they grouped people together with
whom they had similar patterns of contact.
The lifecourse table was designed to elicit a description of events
and not of feelings or reflections and very few people added reflexive
comments to it. However, filling it out served to foreground their
life history in people’s minds: in the interviews, when discussing the
members of their personal community, people talked quite extensively
about their past life and its influence on their current relationships
and the emotions involving the people they had listed or had decided
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to leave out. Having both a list of important events and people’s

discussion of those events in relation to their personal communities
was very helpful in analysing and interpreting the interview material
and making sense of the current shape of each personal community.
Analysis of the data
Some of the data were easy to quantify. For example, the number,
ages, distance to and kin status of each person placed in each ring.
The interviews also allowed us to make a rough estimation of the
number of times a friend was contacted via different media and how
often they were seen face to face. We could also count the number of
different media used by each person. These data can be used to create
graphical pictures (Figure 8.3) and typologies of personal communities.
For example, measures of the distribution of the number of kin and
non-kin friends, such as the median and inter-quartile range, can be
used to identify personal communities that have an ‘average’ mix of
both or those that are kin dominated or non-kin dominated.
Figure 8.3 Number of friends and family in each ring for Alison*
Alison
6
Family
5
Friend
4
0
1 2 3 4 5
Note: *Many respondents wanted to put their stickers overlapping ring boundaries. Hence the codes
above are: 1 = Ring 1; 2=Ring 1/2; 3=Ring 2; 4= Ring 2/3; 5=Ring 3.
However, this approach raises some awkward epistemological issues. As

stated earlier, the sample is not representative of any particular group of
women so descriptive statistical measures only apply to this particular
group. They cannot be used to say that, for example, having more
than 11 non-kin friends in your personal community is unusually
‘high’, even though only one quarter of this particular sample had 11
151
or more non-kin friends. Thus, in analysing the data we have sought

to use the numbers as simply one element in categorising personal
communities and not to use particular numerical boundaries as fixed
arbiters. Nevertheless, such categorisation can be a useful starting
point for a more qualitative interrogation of the quality and type of
relationships in each of the numerical ‘types’. A simple analysis of the
numbers of kin and non-kin members of people’s personal community
threw up some interesting issues. For example, seven of the ten people
with particularly ‘high’ numbers of non-kin friends came from the
more affluent area. This prompted further exploration of the social
background and lifecourse experiences of women with and without
many non-kin friends.
The interviews were a potentially rich source of information
on feelings about friendship and family, about the intertwining of
lifecourse experiences and friendship practices and the role of place
and space in friendship practices. Every interview was recorded and
transcribed. Caroline and I had done roughly half the interviews
each (17 for Caroline and 14 for Sophie) and as soon as they were
completed we discussed the themes that had struck us when doing
the interviews. Then several disparate interviews were read through
and further potential themes identified. Each interview was then read
through in conjunction with the lifecourse questionnaire and the ‘map’
of the interviewee’s personal community.
We found the lifecourse table and the interview discussion of
lifecourse events to be complementary. The lifecourse table could
be criticised for forcing people to prioritise residential moves
and employment or educational changes and downplaying more
emotionally significant moments. However, alongside people’s less
structured, partial and allusive discussions in the interview, we found
the table provided valuable clarity over the ordering of events while the
interview gave us some understanding of the emotional and practical
reasons for lifecourse changes. A summary sheet was completed for
each respondent detailing the ICT used, the places they had lived,
their employment history and that of their partner (if relevant), their
relationships with siblings and grandchildren, their overall relationships
with friends; a summary of notable features of their lifecourse and an
interpretation of its importance to their personal community; and an
interpretation of notable features of the interview.
The text was coded into 13 broad and overlapping themes (Table
8.2). Any particular section of text might be, and usually was, coded
as relating to several themes. Since there were only 31 interviews, it
was decided not to use a software package but to use Word to draw
152
together text with similar codes. Reading through this text then
allowed the identification of subsidiary or cross-cutting themes and
patterns. A further step was to qualitatively compare the responses of
women with different social characteristics, residential histories or
types of personal community. Since this chapter is concerned with
methodological issues rather than with the findings of the study there
is not the space to detail differences between women on any of these
dimensions or to report on the rich complexity of findings from the
data. However, the spatial patterning of the relationships making up
the women’s personal communities and a few of the broad patterns
linking ICT use with friendship practices that emerged from the data
are outlined below.
Table 8.2: Main themes used in coding
Themes
1. Kin relationships 7. Time–space relationships
2. Non-kin relationships 8. Place
3. Neighbouring relationships 9. Embodiment
4. Friends versus family relationships 10. Support/Care
5. Keeping in touch 11. Identity
6. Activities shared with friends/kin 12. Gendered expectations
13.Future expectations
Most relationships in women’s personal communities were ‘local’ in

the sense that over half (55%) the members lived within 10 miles and
over three fifths (64%) lived within 40 miles. As expected from earlier
studies (Wellman, 1979; Spencer and Pahl, 2006) there was no evidence
of local, territorial ‘communities’. As Wellman said over 35 years ago
of his East York study, Canadian respondents’ contacts were organised
as ‘differentiated networks and not as solidarities’. Those who had lived
in Swindon since birth or for most of their adult life were more likely
to have close family living nearby, while traces of more mobile lives
were discernible in the far flung, longstanding friendships or family
contacts of others. Women’s histories of employment and of family
relationships – including having or not having children; the deaths
or illness of partners, siblings, children and parents; and divorce or
separation – were the two elements of the lifecourse most important
to understanding current personal community maps and current
time–space patterns of contact.
153
One woman, in talking about how she had chosen who to include
or exclude from her personal community, said they were people who
were ‘in my life’. Data analysis showed how everyday routines such as
employment and family obligations ensured quite regular and often
frequent face-to-face meetings that kept some ‘friends’ and ‘family’
in each other’s lives. For those living further than about half a day’s
drive away, contact was maintained through less frequent face-to-face
meetings (ranging from about once a month to once a year or less)
and by the use of a variety of old and new ICT. These ICT were
phones – used by all; emails – used, but not frequently for contacting
friends, by 20 women; Facebook – used by ten women, generally
as a way of following the doings of others rather than by making
frequent personal posts; and Skype or Facetime – used by 10 of the
31 women. The most important new ICT used was texting – used by
27 of the 31 women. It was central to organising not only long phone
conversations but also face-to-face meetings with people living both
nearby and further afield. It was also of great importance as a method
of signalling concern and interest in the lives of others, whether or
not they lived far apart. It provided a way of being intimate without
using the richer, but more temporally and spatially demanding, forms
of communication offered by face-to-face meetings and phone calls.
As such, it offers an intensification of everyday ways of being ‘in the
lives’ of others and a new facet of intimacy.
Difficulties and dilemmas
The epistemological pitfalls of using quantitative measures of the

characteristics of a non-representative sample have been mentioned
above. Of course, these pitfalls are not unique to quantitative measures
but the apparent certainty of numbers and the ease with which they
can be manipulated to provide typologies are a temptation to misuse
them. However, qualitative data also pose well known epistemological
problems (Lather, 2009; Silverman, 2011; Trainor, 2013). There is the
obvious danger that interviewees tell us what they think we want to
hear or hold back information for various reasons (Silverman, 2011;
Bryman, 2012). Of particular concern in this study is that in interviews
we ask people to verbalise feelings and emotions that are not frequently
described and that they may not normally scrutinise. We also asked
them to be reflexive about relationships, many of which may be taken
for granted elements of their everyday lives.
During the interviews almost everyone made the important, but
not unexpected, point that meeting their friends ‘face-to-face’ was
154
what they preferred. Despite frequent reference to ‘body language’

and ‘eye contact’ and sometimes to ‘hugs’, people struggled to put into
words the significance of embodied, face-to-face meeting. This is not
surprising, since people’s emotional reactions to an experience are not
always easy for them to identify, let alone to convey verbally – there
may be a ‘gap’ between the experience and feeling and the ability to
describe them in words. Embodied encounters will convey information
between participants that is not consciously registered but belongs in
the domain of ‘affect’. Here ‘affect’ is understood as relating to the
interactions between ‘bodies’ that influence emotional responses, often
without conscious cognition. Academic interest in affect reflects a desire
to acknowledge the importance of bodily sensation and movement
in social interactions and to move beyond a focus on purely verbal or
symbolic representations of social encounters (Davidson and Bondi,
2004; Tolia-Kelly, 2006; Thrift, 2008; Bennett, 2009; Bondi, 2014).
Thus it is not surprising that respondents found the value of face-to-
face meetings difficult to describe while maintaining that “you can’t
beat meeting people face to face” (Charlotte). These difficulties make
it problematic to make claims about the ‘truth’ of people’s feelings and
experiences based on retrospective accounts given in an interview.
Not only may people find it difficult to identify and describe their
emotions and to recall and describe past events, there is also the question
of the researchers’ ability to ‘understand’ the emotional and social
context which interviewees attempt to describe. The importance of
embodied encounters and the emotions they can generate between
participants was exemplified in the interviews which were, of course,
face-to-face meetings. All except two took place in people’s homes,
which added a further layer of emotional response and social assessment
to our encounters. In the interviews people told us about many
difficult emotions and situations stemming from experiences such as:
unhappy childhoods; violent or unfaithful partners; family members’
involvement in crime or drug taking; mental health problems; and
bereavement. They also talked of many intensely pleasurable emotions
involved in friendship and family relationships, of mutual care and
support, of grandparenting, new or restored relationships, new jobs
and hopes for the future.
Both Caroline and I felt that we had experienced moments of
empathy and mutual understanding between us and many interviewees.
In contrast, we sometimes felt uncomprehending or critical of people’s
reactions or views. These observations about the complex process of
interviewees and researchers identifying, describing and interpreting
emotions in interviews raises the issue of whether we can achieve
155
reliable knowledge about the feelings of others. Bondi (2014) has

discussed the value of an understanding of the psychoanalytic concepts
of transference and counter-transference to the problem of producing
knowledge about the emotions of others. While sharing some of the
doubts about psychoanalytic approaches (Thomas, 2007; Holland,
2007; Kingsbury, 2010), I find her suggestions of using the emotional
responses of the interviewer as part of the ‘data’ used to interpret the
interview material and of recognising the importance of the ‘receptive
unconscious’ particularly helpful. A complication is that with two
interviewers it is necessary to exchange information on our feelings
about interview encounters and the places in which they took place.
Unfortunately, we did not keep research diaries – an omission I
now much regret. But it is proving possible to discuss the interview
experience and to interrogate our emotional reactions and to bring
this discussion to bear on our analysis of the interviews.
Bondi also emphasises the dangers of an unreflective ‘empathy’ with
the interviewee, which risks ‘effacing the other’s emotional experience
by assuming it is the same as one’s own’ (Bondi, 2014, p 53; see also
Watson, 2009). This issue is also of particular salience to this research.
Furthermore, there is a danger that we may be more sympathetic
to or influenced by the accounts of respondents with whom we felt
emotional ‘affinity’ and, perhaps, less receptive to the accounts of
those with whom we felt no such affinity. This is a particular aspect
of the well discussed need to pay attention to how the positionality
of the researcher may affect interpretations (Limb and Dwyer, 2001).
Nevertheless, it is a danger worth recognising.
Finally, the emotional responses of our respondents to the interview
process and our own emotional responses raise questions of ethics.
First there is the perennial problem of whether asking people to
talk about aspects of their personal lives will prove harmful to them.
Although we were given ‘informed consent’,3 respondents may not have
anticipated that talking about their personal communities could raise
uncomfortable emotions. Many women said they found it enjoyable or
interesting but the risk remains. We plan to give them the opportunity
to communicate their reactions when we send them a summary of the
results of the research. Second, there is the question of whether doing
the interviews might upset Caroline or me as we heard about difficult
lives or compared the relationships in our own personal communities
with those of the women we talked to (Widdowfield, 2000; Husband
et al, 2001; Evans, 2012). While some women’s stories were upsetting
and it did make us both reflect on and re-evaluate our own situations,
we both had prior experience of this type of interviewing and, in this
156
case, were not unduly affected by it. Third, we are aware that when
we send back the summary of the research to our respondents the
information we give may make some of them compare their situation
unfavourably with those of others. This is a particular risk in relation
to data on the number of ‘important’ friends and family people have;
the frequency and nature of contact with these people and the kinds
of support they receive. We know from the interviews that this is a
question some people were anxious about and there were a few people
with very small personal communities. We will emphasise that there
is no ‘normal’ or ‘absolute’ standard by which to assess one’s personal
community.
Conclusion
The research aimed to collect data that would allow us to place a
particular aspect of women’s lives – their relationships of sociable
companionship and/or informal support – in the context of the multiple
temporal and spatial frameworks which shape and are shaped by those
relationships. In particular, it sought information on the temporality of
their lifecourse and on their current everyday activities and means of
communicating over time and space. The methods used foregrounded
the significance of lifecourse events to the research participants.
Respondents were able to use the concentric circle ‘map’ to physically
represent the importance of their emotional and material links to the
different members of their personal community. The process of placing
people on the map, along with the lifecourse table, proved a valuable
way to stimulate discussion of the (changing) relative importance of
different relationships and of ways of keeping in touch over space. The
interviews allowed them to augment this physical representation with
talk about the emotional significance of the relationships making up
their personal community. Hence they could discuss the emotional
and material significance of the taken-for-granted, mundane, face-to-
face and distantiated interactions, via different communication media,
that constitute those personal relationships over time–space. The
resulting data revealed the importance of migration histories and their
entanglements with changing employment and family relationships;
of travel time and available travel modes; of the places within which
relationships are practised – especially the significance of the workplace,
the home and of public spaces and quasi-public spaces (pubs, cafes and
restaurants); and of the virtual contacts enabled by the mobile phone,
computer and social media to the current social content and frequency
of women’s interactions with members of their personal communities.
157
Carrying out lifecourse research with women in midlife – a neglected

group – allows the researcher to explore these women’s understandings
of the interactions between past lifecourse events, current concerns
and anticipations of the future. In particular, the research shows how
the story of a lifecourse can be told through the shifting relationships
and technologies which constitute someone’s personal community.
The many events impacting on these relationships and discussed by
the participants – such as education, employment change, illness,
birth, bereavement – are the focus of much lifecourse research and
can be further illuminated by recognition of the temporally and
spatially variable companionship, support and sense of identity gained
from kin and non-kin. The emotional importance of such ties, while
challenging to ‘measure’ and interpret, is central to the stories through
which people make sense of their lives and hence should be central
in our attempts to understand those lives. The technical and financial
resources and assets available to people at different times and places
also affect the patterns of contact and interaction available to them. A
focus on such personal relationships, resources and contacts, as in this
research, can ensure that analysis of the temporal that is so central to
lifecourse research does not neglect the significance of the spatial – of
the changing types of interactions and spatial contexts that also shape
people’s lifecourse.
Notes
1
The research was funded by Leverhulme: Grant EM-2012-061\7.
2
All names are pseudonyms.
3
The form asked people to sign the statement ‘I am willing to take part in an interview
about my informal social relationships and for the interview to be recorded’. It also
promised anonymity and that they could withdraw from the research at any time
without explanation. The letter that they were sent had told them ‘We are interested
in finding out about the relationships of women in their fifties with, for example,
friends, family, neighbours, workmates or people they know in other contexts and
how these relationships are changing at this point in their lives. We are also particularly
interested in how women keep in touch with these people and how they manage this
– for example through organised or casual face-to-face meetings, by texting, through
chatting on the phone, writing letters, using email or Skype or social media such as
Facebook or combinations of these.’
158
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NINE
Triangulation with softGIS in

lifecourse research:
situated action possibilities
and embodied knowledge
Kaisa Schmidt-Thomé
Introduction
In this chapter I focus on the possibilities that embodied knowledge
opens up when undertaking research on the lifecourse. Shotter (2009)
argues that social theorists often overlook embodied knowledge as
they evaluate human action through causes (emphasising structures)
or reasons (emphasising agency). In my work on ‘geobiographies’ I
connect the highly contextual and unique with lifecourse information,
specifically relating current everyday life (especially outdoor activities)
with the habitualities developed over a participant’s lifecourse. I
examine embodied knowledge as a joint outcome of the lifecourse and
its geographical context – space and place. In this chapter I use geo-
coordinates as a contextual tool and to underline that the conditions
of action are also shaped by the material world, the ‘geo-’ of the
geobiographies. I provide indicative examples of lifestories, ‘softGIS’-
data (derived from a PPGIS1 application thematising experience-based
data of everyday environments) and walking interviews. I draw some
data from a larger project that used softGIS to study the ways the citizens
used their urban environments for different outdoor activities. I aim to
uncover the self-evident that seems to escape when we verbalise our
experiences but which may be grasped by going back and forth from
the respondent to his/her past and present everyday environments,
both memorised and reactualised.
After this brief introduction, the next section focuses on the promise
of ‘geobiography’ as a concept, the third section on preparedness to
act. In the fourth and fifth sections I show how I triangulate between
methods and data sources, and in the final section I open up a pilot
161
case, which is followed by discussion, and a conclusion. In comparison

with many studies I move between a single case and a larger dataset
somewhat unconventionally, to gain an appreciation of the intricacy
of the phenomena under scrutiny.
The promise of ‘geo’biographies

Pauli Tapani Karjalainen (2003, p 87) has been interested in the
triad of place, memory and self, and has developed the concept of
geobiography: ‘the expression of the course of life as it relates to
the places lived’. For Karjalainen, the focus is on how meaningful
episodes are spatially constituted. Carpelan’s novel Urwind is for him an
example of creative literature that shows ‘how intimate sensing works
out in the many layers of place realities’ (Karjalainen, 1999, p 1). The
main character is the centre of the ‘playground of identity questions,
in which the process of writing is the main medium’ (Karjalainen,
2003, p 89). Of particular resonance to me is his conceptualisation of
the past, the present and the future being co-present here and now
(Karjalainen, 2003, p 87). This intersection is ‘a kind of density from
which the scattering to time and space happens … because we are
never just now but also no more and not yet, and because we are never
just here but also elsewhere’ (Karjalainen, 2003, p 87). Karjalainen
(2008, p 21) has written ‘that the past and the future do not have the
same material thickness as the present has’, because only the present
is realised happening from a certain vantage point, albeit surrounded
and tinted by the past (memories) and the future (expectations). I study
geobiographies through this chiasm where future orientation has a past
in the present; indeed, as Karjalainen (2003, p 91) comments, Carpelan’s
novel tells us, ‘don’t forget to remember, it leads you forward’.
I am not contesting the claim that utilising works of art can bring us
closer to understanding the human condition (Ley, 1985), rather I argue
that geobiographies can shed light also on living, real, flesh-and-blood
individuals, although at present geobiography remains under-used.
For me it holds two promises. First, it does not reduce the material,
physical world into a passive stage, but sees materiality within the
‘promiscuous combinations’ of the ‘material’ and the ‘social’ (Thrift,
1996, p 24). Lorimer (2005, p 85) points to studies that show how
material affinities play a major role in people’s lives. It is in this spirit
that I focus on the ‘geo-’ of the lifelines, to show that the physical, or
the remembered feel of it, can matter even when already remote both
in terms of time and distance.
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Triangulation with softGIS in lifecourse research
Another promise embedded in the concept of geobiography is the

lifelong perspective, the learning and ageing process along our life
span. As I started my project, I anticipated finding some kind of a
‘lifetime geography’, that is, a joint venture of lifecourse geography
and time-geography. It seems that the ‘time-space choreography of
the individual’s existence’ at ‘lifetime (biographical) scale’ (Pred, 1977,
p 208) has been little used empirically. Pred (1981) refers to some
interesting applications, and Katz and Monk (1993)2 mention and
develop some, but most of what I have encountered tend to focus
on shorter periods of time such as seasonal or daily mobility (for
example, Vilhelmson, 1999). As Hartmann (1981, p 282) remarked,
even in Mårtensson’s (1979) study on the formation of biographies in
space-time environments ‘her understanding of a biographical situation
places more emphasis on the sum of daily living conditions than on
the changes in a life-time perspective’. As Frändberg’s (2008) work
on (still) young Swedes seems to have come the closest to a lifetime
view, it seems that ‘lifetime geography’ is still largely unexplored.
Only Hägerstrand (1978) had both imagination and persistence as he
collected data about the lifepaths of all the inhabitants living in his
home village.
There are a number of approaches for gathering life course data,
including ‘lifegrids’ (see Chapter 5 in this book), or the Chicago
School approach (for example, Shaw, 1930) or the study by Goodwin
and O’Connor (see Chapter 4 in this book), revisiting Norbert Elias’
abandoned material. I opted for none of these because I felt that there
is still much work with the conceptualisation of geographies prior to
data collection, and ended up making my own triangulation framework
(see Figures 9.1–9.3).
Contextualised preparedness: some concepts

John Shotter (2009) is interested in the preparedness that we develop
through our lifecourse in order to act in various situations and
interactions that we have ended up being part of. Alongside explaining
action as if it had structural grounds or originated in free agency and
individual reasonings, he would like to see a third dimension, which
keeps the explanations attached to embodied, situational understanding.
For an individual it is central to learn to anticipate, to get prepared
to act in situations that are unique on the one hand, but on the other
hand are somehow familiar from respective situations. While searching
for conceptualisations for this third dimension, embodied understanding,
Shotter (2009, p 220) guides his readers to turn to Samuel Todes’ (2001)
163
suggestion of the concept of poise, position of preparedness. We do not

act in the environment by taking a glance and then turning away in
order to contemplate what (kind of representation) was at stake. We
are present and try to foresee how to best prepare for what we have in
front of us, largely based on lateral similarities across situations.
The way Bourdieu (2000, p 139) has coined action opportunities
resembles what Shotter is seeking. Supported by their habitus,
individuals can endlessly adapt themselves to partially changed contexts
and to find very complex wholes meaningful. The disposition/tendency
to act in a certain way in certain situations is an accumulation from
earlier ones, rooted in, ‘all the walks of life one has travelled’ (Peltonen,
2006, p 160). Afterwards, in particular, action can be interpreted as if it
had been oriented towards a conscious goal although it can sometimes
be ‘pure result’ of earlier orientations, certain ways to act that seemed
interesting in other contexts. These past ‘investments’ (Bourdieu 1994,
pp 151–3) can be felt in present practices as ‘interests with durée’ in
time (Peltonen, 2006, p 175). Action, for Bourdieu, does not rely on
knowledge-based decision making, which is constrained by a set of
factors. If anything, it is about individuals improvising their action
contextually, by virtue of their experience, utilising the different
capacity modes provided by their habitus. Habitus would thus not
determine the forms of social action but would structure internalised
preferences derived through life experience. According to Kivinen
(2006), habitus integrates past experiences into a system of durable
and transferable dispositions. One could see habitus as having ‘sense
of the game’, or ‘eye for the game’, a non-conscious flair for what to
do in a given situation (Kivinen, 2006, p 244).
Triangulation
I wish to take up the gauntlet and try to take the embodied
understanding on board – together with the ‘reasons´ and the ‘causes’.
My methodological choice is to start triangulating by searching
for entry points in the corners of this triangle (see Figure 9.1).
First, I look at my research participants in the light of the available
background information (as a proxy for the ‘causes’) and their lifestories
(‘reasons’) and through their everyday habitualities (‘embodied
knowledge’/‘geohabits’). Then I try to bridge the gaps with other
methods and data sources. Thematically my focus is on the current
everyday life – the outdoor activities in particular – of my research
participants, and the connections of these habitualities with their earlier
lifecourse. I use geo-coordinates as a tool to stick to the context as
164
Figure 9.1: Starting points of my triangulation

Collection of lifestories
as auto-geobiographies
A proxy of ‘reasons’
Individuals: Localised data

background on ‘geohabits’
context data A proxy of the embodied
A proxy of ‘causes’ preparedness?
well as to underline that the conditions of action are shaped also by

the material world, the ‘geo-’ of the geobiographies.
Lifestories
The most obvious avenue to studying geobiographies is to approach

them as stories/narratives, geographical autobiographies. I am aware
but not at all concerned about the stories not corresponding with the
past as such. They are reports of the past as they happen to emerge
here and now, and would never be repeated 1:1 at another occasion.
A key figure in oral history studies, Alessandro Portelli (2006, p 55),
wrote that what people believe in their memories contains more
information than what ‘really’ happened. Oral sources tell what people
did but crucially also what they wanted to do, what they believed to
have done, and afterwards consider having done. And what is told is
equally important as is how it is told.
J. P. Roos (1988), who has used autobiographies to study the
changing way(s) of life in Finland, has written about the particularity
of autobiographies as research material. For him, autobiographies are
attempts to describe one’s own life from a certain perspective, as if it was
a coherent whole. It is this illusory, constructed coherence (Bourdieu,
1986) that makes autobiographies so interesting for Roos (1988). He
allies with the stories rather than looks down on them being full of
165
empty conventions: ‘The narrative structure is by no means something

alien to life but essentially belongs to it. Stories are something that is
essentially connected to human experience and action’ [my translation]
(Roos, 1988, p 220). Furthermore, an autobiography is always told to
someone, according to particular aims and motivation (Roos, 1988,
pp 220–1). We can talk about autobiographic contracts at play (Vilkko,
1987, pp 32–3, cited in Roos, 1988, p 219), and about them differing
between written and oral formats. During my work I have struggled
to learn that, however ‘learnt’ the narrative modes or storylines were,
I should sensitise myself to what they are good at. I sympathise with
Carolan (2008) who sees the world of embodied experience revealing
itself to us even when brought to the realm of representations. ‘It is
not that we cannot represent sensuous, corporeal, lived experience
but that the moment we do so we immediately lose something.
Representations tell only part of the story, yet they still have a story
to tell, however incomplete’ (Carolan, 2008, p 412). We can get a
taste of the respondents’ worlds through their words (Carolan, 2008).
Geohabits and background data about the individuals via a ‘softGIS’

application
I have also utilised data collected about everyday life, sociospatial

practices with the help of maps, in order to grasp the current ‘geohabits’
of my research participants. ‘Geohabits’ are situated performance, the
affordances we live through, and their patterning, the repetition
of certain ways of acting, the usual choices we make, albeit non-
consciously, when taking up with our everyday surroundings. I also
think of them as being mobile, to some degree: if we take up with
new surroundings, we might take old ways of orientation with us.
The data has been derived by a PPGIS (Public Participation GIS)1
application called softGIS, which collects geocoded, experience-based
data from citizens online, with map-based questionnaires (Kyttä and
Kahila, 2011). The development of this approach began in 2005 with a
thematic emphasis on perceived environmental quality but it has since
been developed both to improve its applicability in the different stages
of the urban planning process and to better analyse everyday urban life
(Kyttä et al, 2011; Schmidt-Thomé et al, 2013). For the case at hand
I have used data from the Urban Happiness project (carried out by
my colleagues, a team led by Marketta Kyttä, in 2008–09), collected
among others from the residents of the neighbourhood called Töölö,3
in Helsinki. The softGIS questionnaire utilised in the project had
several sections (for example, localising perceived environmental quality,
166
key everyday services, important daily routes as well as development

suggestions). It also gathered certain background information about
the respondents, such as age, gender, family type and the number of
years lived at their current residence, to profile the participant against
the available statistical data.
Among the benefits of utilising the softGIS data is the possibility to
invite large audiences to share information about their location-based
habits that are harder to grasp via interviews. The ‘banal’ information
about our daily ‘doings’ and ‘likings’ does count, but few people see the
point in sharing them with others. But this is possible via the softGIS
platform, which seems to elevate the mundane by asking for it via a
sophisticated internet application. Another benefit from this kind of
data is that the map-based questionnaires tend to utilise tools that we
are not overly familiar with. As people are nowadays often confronted
with questionnaires and interviews, such tools are used to produce a
subjectivity vis-à-vis people who are strangers; it is nearly quotidian.
The softGIS application may still have a certain novelty value here; it
is not (yet?) shared knowledge what a ‘correct’ response is according to
a certain habitus/lifestyle/political sympathy. We could say that there
is still room for the creative, the performative that surfaces when we
trust intuition. For sure there are also drawbacks to the method. For
instance, we are normally very much conditioned by the actions of
others in the street, but here each respondent is very much alone when
pondering over exactly what to report. The birds’ eye view of maps
could also be quite alien, if it alone was used to trace the actualisation
of past experience.
Proceeding towards the middle

As the three kinds of data sources are not yet connected to each other,
I will now explain how I tried to build bridges between them. This
kind of triangulation is similar to the research methodology Tolia-Kelly
(2010) designed for her study of postcolonial Englishness. She brought
the stories of migrants (testimonies), selected material objects (artefacts)
in their homes and a series of pictures/art works (visual archive) to a
triangulated record to study ‘ecologies of citizenship’ (Tolia-Kelly, 2010,
p 39). For me it was the stories, the urban settings of Töölö and maps
that were brought together; they are the different sources that ‘speak
to different ways of knowing’ (Crang, 2005, p 230).
167
Figure 9.2: Building further interconnections between data, stories and geohabits
STORY
Lifestyle Walking interviews:

actualising the past
CE
AN
PR
RM
O
RFO
FIL
E
PE
soGIS soGIS data
background data on geohabits
on individuals A single response
linking with other
kinds of pasts
Walking interviews
As a bridge between the ‘geohabits’, as revealed by the softGIS

respondents of an area, and the lifestories, I proposed walking
interviews. Walking along and observing the everyday life of research
participants has a long tradition in ethnography/anthropology (Lee
and Ingold, 2006), but the use of ‘walking and talking’ methods is
of recent interest across the social sciences (Clark and Emmel, 2010;
Jones et al, 2008). Some find walking interviews, or go-alongs, ideal
when studying people’s relationship with space (Jones et al, 2008),
and for some they bring ‘greater phenomenological sensibility to
ethnography’ (Kusenbach, 2003, p 478). The main added value that
I see in comparison to room-based or other ‘sitting’ interviews is the
elicitation process of walking through the everyday settings of the
participant. As Clark and Emmel (2010) point out, this process can
prompt more and other kinds of discussions and reveal some everyday
practices of the interviewees. They also provide opportunities for
something unanticipated to happen, for example, for third parties
actively affecting the course of the interview. Such interruptions
are often considered disruptive in an interview situation, but when
168
studying material affinities, encounters with various ‘things’ can also

be left to play a role.
I see walking interviews as a possibility to approach the role
of embodiment and to answer Crang’s (2003, p 501) call about
pushing ‘further into the felt, touched and embodied constitution of
knowledge’. As Ingold (2011) says, it is as wayfarers that human beings
inhabit the earth. We ‘negotiate a way through a zone of admixture
and interchange between the more or less solid substances’ (Ingold,
2011, p 122) that a standard interview would remain detached from
(Kusenbach, 2003), unless explicitly addressed with support materials
such as photographs (Anderson, 2004). As Hall et al (2006, p 3) say,
while place has been under discussion during a walking interview, it
has also been under foot, as an active participant, ‘able to prompt and
interject’.
Individual softGIS responses
As a bridge between the ‘geohabits’ and the background data (described

above) about the person as an inhabitant of the studied area, I have
used single softGIS responses. This has been done with the consent of
the participants, as it would be against the code of conduct in softGIS
to be able to combine the participant with his/her response data. An
individual answer to the survey might not be very informative as such,
but when seen in connection with the neighbourhood context as a
whole, it can open up interesting links. The same holds for the other
direction – the lifestory of the individual and the present day map
might have interesting interconnections. If I can, on the one hand, have
data about the present interpretation of meaningful spatial relations as
reflective witnessing of one’s life and, on the other hand, data about
localised, personal ‘hot spots’, I can probably tell apart some broader
dimensions that matter and should be studied further. Echoing Roos
(1988, p 50) again, everyday life is the established/customary life, which
makes no autobiography, but the orderliness of which is valuable.
Profile tools
The third and final bridge in my triangulation efforts is a hypothetical

one, as no matching data was available from the Urban Happiness
project. It could be built by the respondent profile tools, with the help
of which it has been possible to identify a series of ‘user groups’ among
the residents. In a recent softGIS study (the Everyday Urbanity project
also run by Kyttä’s team in 2010–13), for instance, the respondents
169
were grouped to three resident ‘tribes’: busybodies, homebodies and

neighbourers according to their reported behaviour (approached in
the questionnaire with a series of continua between two different but
not necessarily opposite habitualities, between which the respondent
could move a slider). The user groups are then somewhat different
from what I call reference groups, that can be formed from the more
conventional background data – the ‘middle-aged’, the ‘above average
income’, the ‘highly educated’.
To sum up, I have tried to triangulate between methods and data,
and to tease out different ways of knowing, and identified at least
six different ways of trying to understand the studied individual (or
a habitus). The lifestories not only tell about people’s life but also
about the life people are constantly seeking, and offer people space for
their own reflections. The softGIS data that connects the habitualities
with the neighbourhood, in turn, tells about mundane facts and
non-reflected choices. When related with the participant profiles –
both as users of their neighbourhoods and as representatives of their
demographic and socioeconomic reference groups, we can maybe see
one solution to studying habitus in its everyday context.
Figure 9.3: Approaching habitus from various perspectives
Collecon of lifestories
life sought after reflections

STORY
Lifestyle Walking interviews:

profile tools actualising the past
reference group non-reflected choices

E
NC
MA
PR
OF
OR
ILE
RF
PE
soGIS soGIS data

background data on geohabits
on individuals user group A single response mundane facts
linking with other
kinds of past
170
The bridges can be seen as my attempt to tease out the ‘placial’ out of
the habitus – how certain sociospatial and thus material relations can
be shown to matter. I wish to find something that existing work has
not managed to recognise and to give a feel of how this something
can be surfaced later in future applications. Where Roos (1988, p 133)
was pondering why people do not speak more about the ‘things’, the
everyday items that are important for them, in their autobiographies,
I feel that I have developed one solution: they would be likely to
tell if some other methods and data were used in combination with
analysing the stories.
An indicative example
I now provide an indicative example, a resident of Töölö, corresponding
to the best dataset available for my purposes at that time. First I asked
her to provide a softGIS response using the Urban Happiness project
questionnaire. Then we met for a geobiography interview four days
later, at a location she suggested, and several months later we agreed to
complement the study with a walking interview. At the time I asked
her to become part of my project, we were acquaintances, but over
the course of the research we have become friends.
With a research assistant, I produced a series of maps. First we looked
at the ‘places of happiness’ data from the Urban Happiness project, as
the dataset was one of the most comprehensive ones. From the 356
respondents for the project in Töölö, a total of 291 had marked their
most important place of happiness on the map. For our intentions it
was unfortunate that only 156 of them had indicated also the type
of their most important childhood environment.4 It would have
been interesting to see whether the background of our indicative
person corresponded with the data from other respondents with same
background in terms of childhood environment.
The indicative person had indicated that her most important
childhood environment corresponded with ‘scattered rural’ and we
thus sought for a possible urban–rural divide in terms of responses. First
we mapped all places of happiness and then picked up responses that
corresponded with either ‘city centre’ or ‘scattered rural’ background.
The map showed some tendencies, far from clear patterns, we thought,
and continued further. We tried to group the respondents with the
help of an additional dataset from the project, the ‘years lived in
current residence’, in combination with the childhood environment.
The created subgroups then became very small and it seemed that
171
proceeding along this route with quantitative analysis of some kind

would not bring much added value.
However, the two mappings were useful in another way, as they
indicated some ‘hot spots’. It was possible to find some ‘places of
happiness’ that several recent movers with rural roots appreciated, but
where no urbanite was found among the ‘fans’. Respectively it was
possible to locate a hot spot of the urbanites, having hardly any ‘rural
fans’. Interestingly, our indicative person, representing rural roots,
proposed the very ‘rural hotspot’ as the location for the geobiography
interview. I kindly ask the reader to keep this small coincidence in mind.
In the geobiography interview the interviewee was not given many
limitations in terms of what and how she should tell. I asked her simply
to tell her geobiography as a lifestory in space, or a place portfolio,
in free order and depth of detail. She proceeded most of the time
chronologically, describing first her childhood environment in some
depth and then moved forward to describe later stages of life and the
corresponding geographical settings. As she has both travelled a lot
and lived abroad for several years, she had a great deal to tell. She had
also clearly thought about the implications of moving around more
than many other people might have. She also seemed to enjoy going
through the lifecourse and, apart from a few points in the interview, she
did not seem to feel like revealing personal, confidential information.
Displayed in Figure 9.4 are descriptions of some important places my
interviewee wanted to share with me. I invite you to anticipate, where,
in what kind of environment she grew up? For me these lines are rigid:
riverbank! It is evident that the ways she deals with water elements
and something being ‘on the other side’ of them is very important in
her life. She can also partially put into words her own way to orientate
with/against the water and the shores. She gave me a number of hints
how and where to tease out the non-linguistic ways of knowing that
might be far more difficult to trace with less ‘geo-conscious’ persons.
However, her being well able to reflect on the water-relations does not
necessarily mean that she is more water-relations-oriented than most
other people. There might be very water relations-oriented persons
who are hardly aware of being such. This kind of metonymic relations
tend to become and remain rather subconscious during the lifecourse.
However, apart from the single response that I had got from my
interviewee, I did not yet have much information about her current
everyday life practices. The Urban Happiness project questionnaire
was more oriented towards the questions of perceived environmental
quality than everyday life practices. However, it did collect information
about some of the most important everyday places – the work place, a
172
shop frequently used, etc. As the map about my interviewees response

indicated, this was hardly a synonym of her daily everyday network.
Had we already undertaken the next softGIS supported project
‘Everyday Urbanity’, I could have asked her to fill that questionnaire,
too. In that case there would not have been any other data from the
same area, but at least I could have got her routine spots mapped
without having to ask for them. Instead, I tried to grasp them with
the help of a walking interview.
Figure 9.4: Direct quotes from the interviewee
When talking about the time she spent in southern France, she said:
“There the water is considerably close but as it is the Mediterranean, it

also tells apart … […] … it is a very clear border and what is on the other
side of it – you know, as we spent time also in Marseilles – there is North
Africa very close but very far at the same time.”
Her travel to New Zealand came coupled with this comment:”On the
other hand there you get the feeling, really concretely, that you are far
away from something else, that when you stand at some shore you think
that the next target is Argentina or so. Here [in Helsinki], when you think,
we are always close to something else, and on the other side of the water,
here close by is some environment that is to us pretty familiar or so.”
In the Töölö softGIS questionnaire she had mapped her place of happiness
on the island of Seurasaari, which lies adjacent to Töölö in the Taivallahti
Bay. As a response to why exactly this place, the rocks of the Seurasaari
shoreline, would be her selection she had written:”The sea shore is a
relaxing environment and the presence of the city [on the opposite side]
at the same time gives a cosy feeling of safety.”
It became very obvious that her relationship with water was very
important, and she came to talk about it herself, too:”I feel that the vicinity
of the water is important, it’s hard to imagine living really inland without
a direct relation with the water.”However, she continued:“I have a kind
of respect for the water, so I could not easily be a sailor type of person
really, as I always have this respect for the water.”
What about guessing where she grew up? “I grew up there at the riverbank,
and the vicinity of the river shore was at many levels imp… – how
173
personal things should I open up here?” … “My grandmother taught me

to respect the water deeply … […] … so it kind of gave a certain flavour
to the geography that you really were aware of it being dangerous, even
it was close, peaceful and streamy, but at the same time you know that
it has a dark side.”
The walking interview was carried out one foggy autumn evening as
she would take her dog out for its regular evening walk. We had agreed
to meet close to her home in Töölö and to take a walk wherever she
felt like going to. We ended up walking through Hesperia Park and
then around Töölö Bay; both of which are popular urban parks. As
we walked, I asked some questions about where she would normally
head when taking a walk and why. We also discussed freely about our
lives in Helsinki and went back to the earlier geobiography interview.
I also used the opportunity to let her reflect on one finding of mine.
Then I tried to proceed to question her about other everyday
routines. Where I saw no problem of knowing the interviewee prior
to the biographical interview, I felt surprisingly uncomfortable at this
stage of the walking interview. Some everyday life issues suddenly
seemed very personal, and I felt that some of my questions were
either useless or too intimate. As I wrote in my research diary after
the interview, I could not be myself in that situation, where I felt like
an intruder. However, I think this feeling might not have bothered all
interviewers as much as it did bother me. I also think that I could well
utilise walking interviews in the cases where I would not have to meet
the interviewees outside the research process. After the experience I
searched for ‘warnings’ about uncomfortable feelings in methodology
handbooks but I was unable to find one. While worries about observer
effects or interviewees mixed feelings are thoroughly considered, why
is the researcher’s discomfort silenced?5 Why would we have to push
ourselves through data collection with an uneasy feeling even if seems
to distract the communication?
Despite this methodological discomfort, the walking interview was
helpful as it highlighted the importance of her dog to her daily life.
If there was no dog in the household, she certainly would not take
regular walks, nearly independent of the weather. I am sure we could
have talked about the role of the weather all way through the interview,
inspired by the foggy autumn evening. Both the fog and the dog thus
opened up topics which we might not have touched at all. There
were also numerous interruptions in the interview as she, or both of
us, turned to talk to her dog, who had his say about the chosen route.
174
Implications and limitations

The clearest implications of my work are research oriented. I can come
up with suggestions on how researchers could approach certain topics
otherwise in order to acknowledge a broader range of factors, more
of the ‘background hum’ of the everyday happenings. As a member
of the softGIS team I try to both sharpen certain questions asked via
the softGIS questionnaires and to propose new/alternative ones that
could better tease out the non-linguistic ways of knowing and thinking.
If we ‘all know’ that, for example, water-related affordances are so
crucial, why do we seldom include them in our explanatory models?
If we can assume that dog ownership plays a comparable role to car
ownership in terms of how it shapes our everyday lives, shouldn’t we
then include that aspect in any survey addressing related topics? It is
not evident that social groups (defined through popular variables of
culture, income, education, age, ethnicity and gender) diverge from
each other in terms of their ‘doings’ (Carolan, 2009).
Although the orientation issues that I have described are somehow
common to all of us, I feel that they should not be dismissed as self-
evident. Neither should we consider understanding the complex
patterning of our unique time–space continua as an impossible
mission. I also think that introducing new variables into established
research practices should be a high priority. Why do we focus mainly
on socioeconomic and demographic variables, etc., and leave many
other things aside? Is the availability of certain statistics more than a
bad excuse to repeat the same analyses time and again?
Conclusion
In this chapter I have sought to focus on the self-evident that often
seems to escape when we verbalise our life experiences; but these may
be captured by going back and forth from the research participant
to his/her past and present everyday environments, both memorised
and reactualised. The softGIS toolbox supports this endeavour, but
at the same time the toolbox faces challenges regarding the placing
of ever more relevant questions in the future. Triangulation between
different data sources for the same individual has provided me with an
opportunity to reflect on the limitations of measurability and the role
of new methods at those limits. I encourage social scientists to explore
the embodied dimension; to work as a kind of detective who is going
back and forth from the studied individual to their surroundings, past
175
activities and own witness statements. If these are all anchored in place/
space, the findings come with the contexts where they also belong to.
Notes
1
PPGIS refers to (the combination of technological and analytical) solutions that
are used to inform and improve planning and decision -making processes with
geographically specific information collected from the public (cf Brown and Kyttä,
2014). With origins in the spheres of science and administration, the possibilities
of combining crowd-sourced information with other geocoded data is becoming
increasingly accessible to, for example, community organisations (Schmidt-Thomé
et al, 2014).
2
Prior to their book project Katz and Monk (1993) shared my expectations nearly
20 years ago. We had probably been reading the same texts praising the potential of
Hägerstrand’s approach and thought that somebody had for sure taken up the challenge
also in empirical work. Katz and Monk (1993) themselves, in turn, are successful in
offering a collection of studies overarching the whole lifecourse, but only one entry
on lifestories of West Indian elderly women focuses on the same people in different
life stages.
3
Töölö consists of two urban neighbourhoods (‘Fore Töölö’ and ‘Back Töölö’, together
nearly 30,000 inhabitants) adjacent to the city centre.
4
The locations to choose from were: centre of a city, a suburb, a village or a town in
the countryside, a sparsely populated area, or outside Finland.
5
I am not sure whether Crang (2005, p 231) touches on this issue, when he cites Thrift
(2003, p 106) on fieldwork being ‘a curious mixture of humiliations and intimidations
mixed with moment of insight and even enjoyment’.
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Part III
Mobilities
TEN
Using a life history approach

within transnational
ethnography: a case study of
Korean New Zealander returnees
Jane Yeonjae Lee
Introduction
Since early the 2000s, the number of long-term immigrants to
New Zealand deciding to return to their homelands has increased.
Simultaneously, Korea has made changes to its residency policy in
an attempt to attract ‘global talent’ back to its shores. The result has
been an increase in the number of overseas Koreans returning from
their emigration destinations. The processes driving this movement
and the experience(s) of returnees on resettlement have received little
attention in research.
My research project (Lee, 2012) focused on the everyday experiences
of the 1.5 generation1 Korean immigrants of Auckland, New Zealand,
who permanently returned to Korea between 1999 and 2009.
Moreover, the journeys of those returnees who moved back to New
Zealand after living in Korea for a short period were traced. In total,
the lives of 40 returnees and nine re-returnees were explored through
a life history approach within transnational ethnography including
semi-structured interviews and participant observation. The research
argued that although transnational linkages facilitate movements and
allow immigrants to make strategic life choices across borders, longings
for home as well as a sense of national identity and belonging remain
prevalent among recent Korean New Zealander returnees. While most
returnees learn to value and embrace their hybrid identities and find
ways to settle permanently in Korea, some eventually move back to
New Zealand in the ongoing quest for ‘home’.
The process behind knowledge production is highly subjective and it
functions as an important determinant of both the research process and
183
the research outcomes. Nevertheless, there are not enough places in

which we can converse about how fieldwork gets prepared, carried out,
analysed, and finally written. This chapter is a place for the privileging
of such important matters. In this chapter, I reflect on certain aspects
of my personal journey throughout the study of young Korean New
Zealander return migrants. My personal migration journey, the fact
that I was an immigrant before becoming a researcher, was significant
to this study in terms of shaping its initial research design and the way
I analysed my findings. In the next section, I explain how I began
to develop a life history approach within ‘transnational ethnography’
in an attempt to expand traditional ethnography approaches and to
expose the nature of my ethnographic work. I employed a life history
approach within transnational ethnography to develop the complexity
of research on return migration. Return migration is a significant
phase of a migrant’s lifecourse that casts light on their sense of home,
belonging and identity. With the methodological context established, I
explain my research methods in chronological order. Starting from the
early pilot study in 2008, I discuss step by step the methods employed
to gather data. In the conclusion, I further highlight the significance
of taking a life history approach in research about immigrants.
Developing a life history approach within transnational

ethnography
What distinguishes ethnography from other qualitative research
methods is that it gives emphasis to the ‘natural way’ of studying
and spending extensive time with the participants with the goal of
becoming ‘immersed’ (Rose, 1997) into the researched world. An
ethnographic approach is taken more or less ‘to understand parts of
the world as they are experienced and understood in the everyday
lives of people who actually “live them out”’ (Cook and Crang, 1995,

p 4). By being part of the study participants’ everyday setting, one can
start to unfold the complex experiences of marginality and exclusion.
By taking an ethnographic approach, the researcher no longer seeks
a straightforward narrative, but is concerned with finding multiple
angles to explore the multifaceted nature of people’s life and culture.
Ethnographic work can be conducted in various settings by both
‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ researchers. Christou (2006) and Tsuda (2003),
who are both return migration researchers, employ ethnography as
their main methodological approaches to examine returnees’ everyday
lives. Both scholars spent extensive amounts of time with their
study participants in their everyday settings of workplaces and social
184
Using a life history approach within transnational ethnography
gatherings. Christou (2006) argues that her familiarity with her study
participants (American Greek returnees) and Greece helped her to
carry out her ethnographic research. Being a young female researcher,
who shared a similar age and comparable migratory experiences with
the study participants, she was able to easily make herself belong to
them (Christou, 2003). On the other hand, Tsuda (2003), who studied
Japanese Brazilian returnees, discussed his difficulties of being an insider
researcher. The hardest thing for Tsuda (2003) was that he was well
educated and socioeconomically ‘superior’; hence he was always seen
as the ‘outsider researcher’ by the returnee workers despite his ethnic
familiarity. Reading through various ethnographic methods used by
migration researchers, I came to the understanding that there are both
positive and negative sides to carrying out this type of research. It was
clear to me that my study was going to follow an ethnographic design.
I knew that I wanted to understand the returnees’ everyday lives in
their ‘fullest context’.
I was in a position in which I could encounter the everyday lives
of Korean immigrants every day throughout my research journey.
First, in New Zealand I was living with my sister and mum who have
been discussing my sister’s return for many years. My sister eventually
returned to Korea in early 2010. From her migratory experience,
I was able to understand a returnee’s decision making process ‘as it
was happening’, and I could also gain a retrospective understanding
from one’s early childhood. I could also appreciate the importance
of a family’s role in a returnee’s life as an insider in the ‘family of a
returnee’. Second, I developed close relationships with many of the
40 Korean New Zealander returnees in Korea I interviewed. I was
already a close acquaintance of several and I became friends with several
more. As a result, after the initial fieldwork in Korea, I could easily
talk to them through phone calls and emails, hear about their news
through other mutual acquaintances, and even read their everyday
lives through their personal blogs, websites and social networking sites,
such as in Facebook and Cyworld.2 Third, being a migrant meant that
the topic of Korea and the ‘myth of return’ (Anwar, 1979) was part
of my everyday conversations with family and friends. The amount
of information, thoughts and reflections became enormous and I felt
overwhelmed at some points during my fieldwork process. I could not
stop analysing and enquiring into my everyday activities. Gradually,
I realised that my study ‘site’ was not just a single location of Korea,
but my field location was ‘everywhere’ (Nast, 1994) across the physical
and non-physical spaces I was engaged with. I began to consider my
185
methodological framework as a ‘transnational ethnography’ and started

to seek a more systematic way to document my everyday encounters.
In the beginning, I wanted to switch off the scholar’s part of my brain
because on many occasions I felt like a spy; listening to my friends’
conversations while secretly thinking of how this might be useful to
my study. But such a struggle inside me quickly became a passion and
I realised that studying my everyday surroundings was actually helping
me learn about the people in their most ‘natural’ setting. All of the
initial methods of ‘trying to become a returnee’ and ‘trying to become
immersed into Korean culture’ were just ‘doing what’s told’ from
ethnographic literature (Cook and Crang, 1995; Parr, 2001). Although
carrying out the initial ethnographic work in Korea provided significant
information for my research, I was artificially making myself enter the
‘field site’ of Korea to study the people in that particular location. In
reality, their lives are strongly connected to New Zealand, and also
to the non-physical world of online communities, where even more
critical information could be gained.
Wilding (2007), an Australian anthropologist, has used the term
‘transnational ethnography’ and has clearly argued:
For ethnography to be applied to transnational contexts, I

would suggest that it was first essential that fieldwork be re-
imagined so as not to require the ethnographer as ‘research
instrument’ to be located in a single, other, place – where a
group of people were long-term residents – for an extended
period of time. (p 336)
Indeed, studying the returnees’ everyday activities is always situated

within the transnational context as their lives are always here and there
across borders and beyond to the online communities. Wilding (2007)
further illustrates the irony of transnational ethnographers putting
emphasis on being at multi-local places, travelling from Brazil to Cuba
and to Argentina (Scheper-Hughes, 2004) or travelling back and forth
between places to call it a ‘transnational’ ethnography. Yet, there is a
difference between being multi-local and translocal (Wilding, 2007).
By being translocal, you are employing a ‘transnational’ practice from
a location to study transnational lives, which can be argued as the
most ‘natural’ way to study transnationals’ everyday settings (Brickell
and Datta, 2011). Following such a view of my personal encounters, I
started to develop my focus of observation from a ‘translocal’ angle, both
in physical and online spaces. Hence, by using the term ‘transnational
ethnography’, one of my main methods became (participatory)
186
observations of Korean immigrants and returnees around me – before,

during and after my actual interviews took place in Korea and New
Zealand. In other words, my ethnographic work and ‘field’ observation
did not have to be limited by a physical location.
Along with the methodological aim, this research took on a life
history approach (Wallace, 1994) in order to collect information
from their very initial stage of migrating experience to New Zealand
from Korea to gain a holistic understanding. Life history approach
was utilised as a powerful tool in this research. It allowed me to focus
on the participants’ life narratives, and to gain a rich understanding
of their long-term motives. Taking a life history approach along
with the transnational ethnography helped me to vividly explore the
complexities of the participants’ lives.
Life history within transnational ethnography: doing

research
My fieldwork began in 2008 with a pilot phase in which casual
conversations were carried out with seven returnees in Korea. In 2009,
interviews were conducted with 40 returnees in Korea and then nine
re-returnees3 were interviewed in New Zealand. Online and print
media analysis and participant observation were conducted throughout
the entire course of my fieldwork period. My interviews were semi-
structured. I had some prepared themes and questions, but questions
were altered and more questions were asked according to participants’
personal interests and circumstances. As I indicated earlier, I took a
life history approach in order to gain a holistic perspective on their
return trajectories. There were three parts to my interview as shown in
Table 10.1. I started by asking them about their childhood and teenage
experiences in New Zealand, their present return experiences, and
moved to thematic themes related to their near future. Although I did
Table 10.1: Interview questions/prompts: a lifecourse approach
Stage I: Pre-return phase Stage II: Return migration Stage III: Thematic
Reasons for immigrating Reasons for returning to Gyopo and identity
to NZ Korea Citizenship
Teenage years in NZ Life in Korea (work and Nationalism
Good and difficult times family) Home
Connections to NZ Inclusion and exclusion
Future plans
187
not have any predetermined order, I made sure that I touched on all
three parts to my interview questions (see Table 10.1).
One of the most important interview practices was preparing
prior to the interviews and making extensive field notes afterwards.
For some of the participants, I had already known their occupations
and basic background information through the mutual acquaintance
who introduced us. Hence, I tried to do some research on their
occupations and designed some specific questions accordingly. Also,
after each interview, I wrote one to two pages of field notes including
my first impression of the person, the interviewee’s gestures and facial
expressions, their work place or house settings, and the conversations
that were carried out when the audio-recorder was not recording (those
on our way to the interview place and directly after the interview
finished). Sometimes, interviewees started to talk about the most
interesting things and shared their personal opinions soon after the
recorder was turned off. Hence, writing notes through retrospective
memory was critical and they were mostly carried out shortly after I
had left the interviewee.
A strong point of connection with the participants was that we are
all 1.5 generation immigrants. The participants used terms such as ‘as
you know’ and also told me more personal stories ‘off the record’.
These really helped me to make connections with them and allowed
them to trust me and freely express their feelings to me. Some even
said that I was the first person to know any of their inner most feelings.
It is contended that ‘insiders may build trust and develop relationships
with their respondents in ways that outsiders may not be capable’
(Palmer, 2001, p 66).
Besides interviews, participant observation was highly critical
to my research project not only to gain ‘complementary evidence’
(Kearns, 2010), but for its provision of useful background information.
Importantly, observational methods allowed me to be self reflexive.
Through various observational methods (see Table 10.2), I could gain
a contextualised and holistic understanding about the returnees’ lives.
Some of the returnees were my close friends whom I spend most of
my free time with; I visited their houses and we went on a couple
of road trips together while I was in Korea. Although in many cases
observation is ‘the outcome of active choice rather than mere exposure’
(Kearns, 2010, p 242), on many occasions, I was simply exposed
to the returnees’ lives because they were included in my everyday
activities outside my research life. Nonetheless, I started to document
my experiences with a number of returnees, which I also openly told
188
Table 10.2: Different kinds of observations
Observations Locations, Time Description

(A) Returnees’ houses, The researcher’s everyday settings. Majority
Individual cafes, restaurants, of the observations were not intended. Often
observation at bars, shopping notes were taken retrospectively. In some
informal social malls, researcher’s occasions, mobile phone was used to take notes
gatherings house, streets immediately. The researcher was in complete
and personal participation. Some photos were taken.
settings March–July 2009
(B) The University of The alumni event was an intentionally organised
Event Auckland Alumni event by the researcher. YLN formal dinner was
observation event in Seoul; 22 not organised by the researcher. Both events
at formally May 2009 were attended with the intention to observe
organised with particular themes. Participants and
social YLN (Young non-participant returnees were spoken to and
gatherings Leader’s Network) observed at various levels. Extensive notes were
formal dinner in taken after each event. Some photos were taken.
Seoul
; 11 June 2009
(C)Site Various areas A number of facilities and places that were
observation and people mentioned by the interviewees were observed
around Seoul and by the researcher. Additional information was
Auckland2008–10 found through internet. Little or no researcher
participation.
(D) Returnees’ personal Fifteen participants’ personal online blogs,
Online blogs, websites and websites and social networking sites, such as
observation social networking Facebook and Cyworld, were visited once or
sites, email twice a week over a period of one year. Notes
conversation, phone were taken occasionally. In a majority of times,
calls complete observation was carried out with little
participation.
July 2009–2010
(E) The researcher’s Full participation and some intentional
Self personal life in observation. The researcher’s ‘insider’
observation Korea and New experiences in Korea and New Zealand were
(Self-diary Zealand documented in personal journals. This journal is
participation) different from ‘field notes’.
March 2009–2010
them. On other occasions, I also observed the returnees’ lives from a

distance through online spaces (see Table 10.2).
Table 10.2 illustrates how participant observation was significant in
terms of making sense of my interview data and to understand the
participants’ lives from various angles. Observation ‘A’ (Individual
observation) provided some highly private information, which I could
not have gathered had I not been a family member or a close friend of
the participants. Although observations did not happen intentionally, I
took notes when I found something compelling or interesting during
189
conversations. Event observations (Observation ‘B’) happened twice

while I was based in Seoul in 2009. Prior to the fieldwork in Korea, I
contacted the University of Auckland’s alumni office and asked whether
I could organise an alumni event while I was in Korea. They were happy
to provide some funding for the event and gave me the key alumni
contacts in Seoul. During the process of organising the event, I was
able to be in contact with a small number of Korean New Zealander
returnees who were happy to help out with organising the event.
Through numerous meetings with them, I was able to learn about
their lives and migratory stories (and they also became my interview
participants). At the event itself, I also met a large number of Korean
and non-Korean graduates from the University of Auckland. I was
invited to attend the YLN (Young Leader’s Network) formal dinner.
At the dinner, I met a group of Korean New Zealander returnees with
whom I made contact. At both events, I observed the dynamics of the
event, overheard some conversations, and also fully participated in the
event. Because I attended both events with the intention to observe, I
was more aware of the ‘happenings’ and remembered the details. The
observations were written into descriptions and they were useful in
making sense of my data and providing context in my result sections.
Site observation (Observation ‘C’) was most malleable in its nature.
On some occasions, I took a walk along the busy streets in Seoul and
remembered the things that were said by my participants about the
‘busy lifestyle’ in Korea. In contrast, when I returned to New Zealand,
I observed the differences in the living environment. I decided to
take notes of my feelings (what I could do, see, hear, touch, and
smell) towards the different places of Korea and New Zealand. I took
pictures of various sites and tried to make sense of them from my own
perspective. There were also a number of specific sites that I visited
such as the immigration office in Seoul, banks, a gym and shopping
malls in Korea. I used these facilities as an insider and also observed
the difficulties and benefits that were mentioned by the participants.
Those notes were valuable in terms of providing a vivid description of
the differences between places in Korea and New Zealand.
Online observation (Observation ‘D’) was the easiest one to do in
terms of the time and techniques. However, it was the most difficult
one to write about mostly for ethical reasons. As mentioned earlier
in the chapter, my online observations mainly involved visiting
the social networking sites of the returnees (that is, Cyworld and
Facebook). The benefit (or irony) of this observation was that I was
exposed to some incredibly private stories from a distanced position.
Through the personal journals and pictures that were posted on the
190
participants’ profiles and websites, I could understand their happiness

and difficulties of living, complexities of the human mind, sometimes
contrasting information with the interview data, and sometimes it even
made me re-evaluate priorities for my own life. While this exercise
was significant, I had to be aware of the ethical issues. Hence, I did
not make many notes about the individual participants, but more or
less used the observation as a ‘thinking tool’ (Kearns, 2010) to give
me prompts and directions in analysing my interview data. On some
occasions, I did ask the participants whether I could use some of their
quotes or pictures (if it seemed ethical at that time).
The last observational method (‘E’ – Self-observation) was
an experimental method. My initial attempt was to conduct an
‘autoethnography’ (Butz and Besio, 2009; Ellis and Bochner, 2000),
‘a form of self-narrative that places the self within a social context’
(Butz and Besio, 2009, p 1), which means the boundary between the
researcher and the objects of representation becomes blurred and the
research subjects obtain a new perspective. I wanted to experiment
with this method in a rather small scale form, through my experiences
of living in Korea as a returnee. In order to experiment with this
method, I had made sure that I was based at an institution while I
was in Korea. My experience of living as a visiting researcher at Seoul
National University (NSU) provided a ‘social place’ for me in Seoul.
Through my everyday interactions with the local Korean students, I
gained new feelings, experiences of identity negotiations, and I could
truly compare myself with other returnees and understand their stories
to a greater extent.
In 2010, I conducted nine further interviews with a group of
Korean New Zealander returnees who were now living in New
Zealand. Hence, this group was termed as the ‘returned returnees’
or ‘re-returnees’. I was interested to talk to a number of returned
returnees because empirically, there are a large number of them in
Auckland. I wanted to find out what made them return back to New
Zealand after making such a big step to return to Korea. From the 40
interviews in Korea, it was clear that the returnees’ experiences varied
hugely according to personal circumstances. For some, return meant
a reconnection to their roots and belonging, while for others return
did not bring them much happiness. When I was aiming to deeply
analyse this idea, it was a logical step to talk to those who decided to
return back to New Zealand – hypothesising that they have returned
back to New Zealand because they had negative experiences in Korea.
I ended up talking to nine returned returnees. Most of the participants
had lived in Korea for around two years and worked in various kinds
191
of occupations. All of them were single, which made it easier for them
to move between places. Moreover, all of the participants’ parents were
living in New Zealand. The stories about re-returnees were critical
in adding comparisons and richness to the current data. Importantly,
they added understanding of their post-return experience in New
Zealand in terms of narrating their identity negotiations and growth.
Ethics and positionality

I observed not only my study participants with whom I conducted
interviews, but also immigrants and non-immigrants around me. While
observing the people around me every day seemed like a logical choice
to carry out an ethnographic study, I had to be careful about what I was
observing and how I was observing for various ethical reasons. I had to
be reflexive and be cautious about the circumstances of my positionality.
Table 10.3: Author’s positionality
Research methods Positionality Consequence Negotiation

Pilot research in Korea, As a 1st year As a researcher, I I tried to be
2008 PhD student, did not have much disconnected from
I was visiting knowledge about my research while
Seoul as part of the returnees’ lives I was talking to the
my conference at this point. As an returnees. I had to
trip. I had read insider, I had many keep my questions
around the basic close friends who very simple.
literature on were returnees.
return migration,
home, and identity
politics.
Participant observation I was an insider Making contacts When interview

+ interviews (40 immigrant with the returnees participants
returnees) in Korea, researcher. I was was very easy. asked me about
2009 living in Korea for Yet, some of other returnees,
a short term and the interview I maintained
was based at an participants were confidentiality. I
institution as a too closely related played down my
visiting researcher. to each other. I was role as a researcher
I also had many involved in many and stressed my
close friends who social gatherings of ‘insiderness’.
were returnees. returnees.
192
Research methods Positionality Consequence Negotiation

Participant observation Within New I could be more Because I had
+ interviews (9 re- Zealand, I was open about my already talked
returnees) an immigrant, positionality to numerous
in NZ, 2010 researcher, and a among my family returnees, I
family member. and friends in was constantly
Most interviews NZ. I could be observing my
and observations strategic and ask relatives, friends
were done chosen questions and family. While
when I was 3rd to the interview I could gain useful
year researcher, participants in information, I
hence I had more New Zealand. had to be more
knowledge. reflexive.
Online participant I consider myself Because I was I had to be careful
observation, as 1.5 generation close friends with not to ‘scrutinise’
2009–2010 and x-generation. a large number of their lives too
I am aware of returnees, I had much. I did not
many online sites easy access to use any of the
that are used by their everyday lives quotes or photos
young Korean and through online without asking
NZ online users. communities. I the returnees’
I have access to could understand permissions. At the
computers and a their lives this way. same time, I had
smart phone. the privilege to
further look into
their lives.
Self diary participation, I am an insider I was involved in I had to be careful
2009–2010 1.5 generation. I many activities not to be ‘self-
had lived in Korea at SNU with the indulgent’ and
as a returnee in local students. I spend too much
2005, and could was also spending time on worrying
experience it again a lot of time with about my own
in 2008 while I other returnees. I personal politics. I
was in Korea for observed myself had to draw a line
fieldwork. I had being a complete and focus on what
access to the local returnee and a I was writing for
Korean community. researcher. I wrote rather than writing
an extensive field about every single
journal. experience.
Table 10.3 explains a number of my subject positions which affected

my research process, and how I coped with the consequences.
Analysing data
I employed discourse analysis to analyse my interview data. Although
discourse analysis originates from a linguistic approach (Brown and
Yule, 1983), social scientists also employ the practice by emphasising
the significance of context which affects oral texts (Wood and Kroger,
193
2000; Hannam, 2002; Van Dijk, 2009; Waitt, 2010; Hammersley,

2003). Within geography, discourse analysis is often described as an
interpretive tool to determine the ‘rule’ or the ‘structure’ which governs
particular oral, written and visual texts (Waitt, 2010). In other words,
‘rather than letting the words speak simply for themselves, discourse
analysis treats texts as mediated cultural products which are part of
wider systems of knowledge which may set the limits for, or discipline,
everyday life’ (Hannam, 2002, p 195). It is difficult to explain how
discourse analysis is different from other forms of qualitative analysis
such as grounded theory which also attempts to seek a ‘contextual’
understanding. It is argued that discourse analysis places ‘greater
emphasis on variability (both within and between persons) than do
other methods of qualitative analysis’ (Wood and Kroger, 2000, p 28).
Indeed, my research objective was not to make a grand theorisation
on Korean New Zealander’s return migration, but to illustrate the
complexities of their lives and depict their narratives as they are. By
conducting discourse analysis, I not only looked for ‘what’ they said,
but focused on ‘how’ that oral text has been produced through a
shared sociological, historical and cultural understanding. I looked for
connotations in their narratives and attempted to ‘contextualise’ their
norms, values and perceptions.
The writing part of the research was challenging. I had to be ‘self
reflexive’ and I have encompassed so many different kinds of materials
(ranging from interviews, pictures, written notes and secondary data)
which have been strategically put into a certain order to convey my
arguments along the way. Bondi (2004) talks about the irony behind
academic authority. There are contradictions when it comes to reflexive
writing because we are problematising our way of thinking and
subjective understandings, yet we still have to speak in strong voices
and argue clearly as academics. This was the most difficult aspect of
my writing process as I was trying very hard not to generalise, yet
there were certain things that had to be or overemphasised in order
to fit into my argument. Indeed, I was always contemplating whether
I was simply representing my data or ‘re’-presenting (Bennett and
Shurmer-Smith, 2001). Was I changing any of the data to make it fit
what I wanted to say? I tried hard to stay away from ‘re’-presentation,
and simply just represent narratives and stay true to participants’ stories.
Conclusion: taking a life history approach in ethnography

In this chapter, I have illustrated the initial research design, my research
methods, and how I attempted to make sense of my data and material
194
to produce my written work. I showed that taking a ‘transnational

ethnography’ approach to study the participants was not the initial
design of this project. Deciding to study their online spaces and
engage with their everyday activities more actively came from my
personal realisation of ‘already being in my study field’ in my everyday
encounters. Hence, the research developed further to document the
returnees’ lives not only through interviews, but through observing
their lives more actively. The research methods in this study mainly
involved semi-structured interviews with 40 returnees in 2009, and
later with nine re-returnees in New Zealand. Observations of their lives
were conducted in direct and indirect ways which ranged from spending
time with the participants in personal settings, occasional events such as
the University of Auckland alumni event, and also indirectly through
their online communities. As discussed, I was heavily involved in the
research participants’ lives and was aware of the role of my positionality.
I attempted to reflect on my role as the observer. During my analysis
and writing process, I attempted to develop a more critically distanced
analysis in which my personal knowledge and subjectivities had minimal
impact on my findings. At the same time, the fact that I had close
relationships with some of the study participants and that I was an
insider researcher created a strong researcher–participant bond. This
bond allowed a much more nuanced finding about the returnees’ lives
that may not have been possible for an outsider researcher to obtain.
Taking a life history approach to return migration was significant
in highlighting the longer-term factors which affected the returnees’
decision making processes. For instance, by considering their life
histories, I was able to see returnees’ motivations to return as having
grown over the course of their time as part of an ethnic minority in
New Zealand. Given most participants immigrated to New Zealand
as early teenagers, for some this sensitive identity development phase
of participants’ lives was affected by their minority status in their host
society. Through the difficult experiences of growing up as ‘Asian
kids’, they slowly acquired a sense of alienation and felt inferior to the
majority of young people. Trying to ‘fit in’ during their school years was
stressful and some recalled bullying at school. Even those who seemed
to be well integrated and those who made Western friends easily never
felt fully included and accepted. These difficulties eventually led to a
return ‘home’. In doing so, I was able to argue through my research
finding that the returnees’ return motivations were part of a long-term
process, rather than a ‘strategic’ decision based on job opportunities,
which is the more widely acknowledged return intention within a
transnational framework. Without taking a life history approach and
195
ethnographic methods, such a complex but vivid picture of returnees’

motivations could not be achieved.
Notes
1
I follow the broader definition used by Bartley and Spoonley (2008, p 68) to refer to
‘children, aged between six and 18 years, who migrate as part of a family unit, but who
have experienced at least some of their formative socialisation in the country of origin’.
2
‘Cyworld’ is an online community that is widely utilised by Korean online users.
3
As I refer to the group of returnee Korean New Zealanders who decided to return
to New Zealand after living in Korea for a short period of six months to two years.
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ELEVEN
Sensing sense and mobility at the

end of the lifecourse: a methodology
of embodied interaction
Anne Leonora Blaakilde
We do violence to the complexity of lived experience when

we make analytical cuts between emotions and thought, or
emotion, the senses, thought, and action. (Davies, 2010,
p 25)
Introduction
The sun is setting over the Mediterranean Sea far below me, and my
front view is a locked gate, seeming in a hostile way to knot the tall
fence together around a complex of luxurious accommodations on
the top of a mountain by the Turkish Riviera. The car I am sitting
in is sloping backwards at an angle of approximately 20 degrees, the
back pointing drastically downwards, down the mountain; the driver,
83-year-old Howard, is unsuccessfully trying to make the remote
controller open the gate. I know he has had some drinks today, which
worried me a little as I got into his car 20 minutes prior to this moment.
In the early afternoon, I met him while participating at the Danish
men’s weekly bowling games, doing my fieldwork in this area in order
to study elderly retired Danes living in Turkey. He invited me to a
restaurant this evening, and as we met in the city at six o’clock, he
asked me to leave my car and get into his. When departing the city via
the highway along the sea, he said that we would go to his home first
to have a drink. Slightly uncomfortable, I realised that I could either
refuse and tell him to let me out of the car, or I could learn from this
as any other fieldwork experience – and I chose the latter.
Now, in a car leaning backwards directly down a small and winding
mountain road, I hear Howard saying that the remote does not work,
and he’ll try from outside. With drops of sweat on my forehead I think:
‘My God, does he know how to work the handbrakes, and do they
199
work properly? Should I hop out of the car right now?’ He gets out
of the car, leaving a thick book in the front window inside. The book
is a mix between a calendar and a notebook, typical for many Danes,
where you keep track of appointments and write notes at the same
time. Howard’s notebook is full of old journal cuttings and memory
notes, and he calls it ‘My Memory’.
International retirement migration (IRM) is a phenomenon of
increasing research interest concerning retirees who practise migration
to the ‘solar utopias’ of the world (Simpson, 2015). This phenomenon
has been studied in a broad range of disciplines, and from the
perspective of different national groups, (King et al, 2000; O’Reilly,
2000; Gustafson. 2002; Ackers and Dwyer, 2004; Bozic, 2006: Balkir
and Kirkulak, 2009).The field is characterised by people who migrate
after retirement. They have been categorised into different types of
foreign residents. These are: full-time residents who live the year round
in their new host land, returning residents/second home owners who are
residents in their new host land and stay most of the year but return
once in a while to their country of origin, and seasonal visitors who
travel back and forth, but stay mostly in their home country. O’Reilly
(2000) and Williams et al (1997) have slightly different terms which
are incorporated here.
I have carried out fieldwork studies in Spain and Turkey. The case
in this chapter is from Turkey, where I spent five weeks in the spring
of 2013, doing participant observation and interviews with 16 Danish
permanent residents, aged 42–79 years, and I participated in a variety
of social events in both public and private spaces. My studies in Turkey,
and previously Spain, pinpoint the heterogeneity of the elderly people
who choose to spend their later life in a foreign country. Among all
the topics studied, like motivations for moving, health practices in
national and transnational contexts, social life and national identity,
the results vary depending on the people in question and their life
situation – socially, economical, in terms of health, etc. (Blaakilde,
2007a; 2007b; 2013; Blaakilde and Nilsson, 2013). There seems to
be an overall representation of courage and audacity, mobility and
flexibility connected to the migration act, even though many of the
interviewees were suffering from various diseases. However, if their
functional health seriously deteriorates, life can become much more
complicated than when living in their home country, Denmark. In
that case, most of them decide to return to Denmark, in order to get
access to healthcare services in a context they understand, and where
(maybe) family or friends are around. Hence, spatial situatedness,
mobility decisions and return migration imply difficult considerations.
200
A methodology of embodied interaction
Furthermore, returning to the homeland can be comprehended as a

double decline; life in the solar utopia was indeed chosen because of
the higher level of life quality experienced there.
In this chapter, the focus of empirical interest is centred around one
Danish retirement migrant, Howard, menaced by mental degeneration,
who is attempting to maintain and perform a life as it was before.
The later part (and maybe more) of his life course is characterised
by mobility and transnational experience, and mental illness may
imply consequences related to spatiality, which are different from the
lives of persons with a lifelong residence in their home country. The
primary argument presented in this chapter will be an examination of
the ways methodology focusing on senses and embodied interaction
can contribute to an understanding of decline at the end of a
person’s life course. In Davies and Spencer (2010) anthropologists
and psychoanalysts are calling for more methodological employment
of senses and emotions in ethnography, and this chapter contains a
contribution to this request. The methodological approach chosen is
influenced by a ‘haptic epistemology’ (Marks, 2002), trying to grasp
and transfer the process of making sense by means of sensing, listening,
and by embodied mobility in space.
This haptic methodology is first contextualised with a brief
introduction to approaches previously examined by ethnographic
scholars. Next, the methodology will be presented along with an
analysis of Howard’s responses and reactions to a kind of mental
decline which is not rare at the end of the life course, and which can
have crucial impacts when related to a person accustomed to living
a mobile life. The chapter concludes by arguing that the employed
sensuous theory and embodied interaction of the ethnographer is
fundamental in order to grasp a kind of understanding of this kind of
life situation as a part of lifecourse research. The perspective provides
an argument for ambiguous co-construction perspectives by means
of post-phenomenology, allowing for a dissolving of classic dualisms
like body/mind and subjectivity/objectivity. Such dualisms are
normally adherent to appraisals of objectivity, whereas the argument
in this chapter is that intersubjectivity is indispensable for achieving
understanding of life course experiences.
Haptic epistemology: from penetration to erotic encounter

Haptic epistemology is a sensuous theory and an approach which can be
very fruitful within life course research. It is pronounced by the film
critic and film professor Laura U. Marks, who is inspired by Merleau-
201
Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied perception (Merleau-Ponty,

2002 [1945]). Further inspiration comes from Deleuze and Guattari’s
rhizomatic philosophy focusing on organic forms of intertwinement
and multiple foldings as a basis for epistemic understanding of the
complexity of the world (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005). Semantically,
words synonymous with ‘touch’ and ‘movement’ connote both bodily
and emotional features. In her book Touch, Laura Marks employs the
term ‘haptic’ for a contact that moves, like a mimetic: ‘it presses up to
the object and takes its shape’. However, it should not be considered
a positioning as a mere representation, rather it resembles a process: ‘a
robust flow between sensuous closeness and symbolic distance’ (Marks,
2002, p xiii). For Marks, the haptic is related to ‘the erotic’, and she
defines ‘erotic’ as the ability to oscillate between closeness and distance.
‘A lover’s promise is to take the beloved to that point where he or she
has no distance from the body – and then to let the beloved come
back, into possession of language and personhood’ (Marks, 2002, p xvi).
From a methodological perspective, this relates to an ongoing
discussion among scholars of ethnography regarding the implications
of the term ‘participant observation’, which involves a kind of paradox
between the ethnographer concurrently being a participant and an
observer at a distance (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). Ethnography has
always involved experiential methodology. Bronislaw Malinowski
reported in 1922 from the Trobriand Islands that his close observation in
the daily lives of the natives was a necessary scientific approach in order
to ‘penetrate’ the ‘mind’ and ‘mental attitude’ of the native Trobriands
(Malinowski, 1984 [1922], p xv and p 19). Malinowski’s modernist,
functional ideals represented a hermeneutical approach and a positivist
epistemology with the aim of getting the most scientifically valid
account of the ‘native’s vision of the world’; from ‘his (the native’s) point
of view’ (Malinowski, 1984 [/1922], p 25). Fifty years later, Clifford
Geertz criticised a stance then taken within ethnography, which praised
‘emic’, ‘inside’, ‘experience-near’ and subject-penetrating ideals of the
ethnographer getting ‘into someone else’s skin’ (Geertz, 1979, p 227).
Geertz, on the other hand, argued for an analytic interpretation of
the symbols, signs, and structures following a textual interpretation
(Geertz, 1972; 1979). Both Malinowski and Geertz conveyed ideas
of ‘The Native’ as a subject who is in contact with and interpreted by
the ethnographer, but they did not struggle much in epistemological
terms with their own subjectivity, their relationship and interaction
with this native; the ethnographic ‘other’. Such considerations were
propounded by other anthropologists from the 1980s and onwards in
the ethnographic wave of reflexivity and crisis of representation (Ruby,
202
1982; Clifford and Marcus, 1986). In line with the advancement of

social constructivism, ethnographers were challenged with previously
learned, strong epistemologies of modernism grounded in dualisms
like subjectivity/objectivity, language/world, and in deeply embedded
notions of the subject as a firm, delineated container (Lakoff and
Johnson, 1980). After the waves of postmodernism, poststructuralism
and the linguistic turn, most social sciences have no expectations of
a privileged or objective representation of a given observation (Katz,
1994; Gergen and Gergen, 2014). The constructivist epistemology
presupposes that contact and interaction is inherent for any
comprehension of the world; and that neutral objectivity is not a
realistic – nor an ideal – aim to anticipate (Hacking, 2007). Transposed
to ethnographic methodology, this means that knowledge is created
by – and because of – the ethnographer’s interaction with a specific
field of interest. Furthermore, ‘messy’ methodologies, founded on
interpretations and performances of multiple identities and interactions
influenced by situatedness, authorise methodological uncertainty
(Denzin, 1997; Law, 2004). This interactionist point of departure
takes us back to Laura Marks’ sensuous theory of touch, which may
contribute to new methodologies of sensing and understanding
phenomena of the unknown. In this case, it concerns the consequences
of bodily decline for elderly people accustomed to living mobile lives.
The haptic epistemology is embedded in a post-phenomenological
approach to the body. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of
the body presents a foundation for human sensing of the world and a
critique of the dualistic distinction between body and world. Embodied
experience is, according to Merleau-Ponty, the substratum of human
cognition (Merleau-Ponty, 2002 [1945]), which means that knowledge
and understanding are results of actions and doings rather than the
opposite causality (Jackson, 2005). The ethnographer’s touching is
included in this post-phenomenological approach, which constitutes
Marks’ interpretations of the erotic element of a haptic relationship.
In a haptic relationship our self rushes up to the surface

to interact with another surface. When this happens there
is a concomitant loss of depth – we become amoeba-like,
lacking a center, changing as the surface to which we cling
changes. We cannot help but be changed in the process of
interacting. (Marks, 2002, p xvi)
For the purposes of this chapter, I use sensuous theory and haptic
methodology to get a sense and an idea; to understand how it is to
203
be a person like Howard, a previous mobile and capable body now

in mental decline.
Dinner with Howard

Finally, the fence drew apart, Howard entered the car and drove into
the gated community – I survived! It was an urbanised area of expensive
villas, of which few seemed currently inhabited. His home was all
white with exclusive furniture and fur carpets; only the paintings
were colourful, some of them painted by his wife, he said. I asked
him about his wife; he said that she preferred to stay in Denmark
now, painting. Her hearing was so bad; she did not find amusement
in travelling anymore, or even in meeting other people. Everything in
the house was immaculate and reminded me of an article in a Home
and Living magazine. He showed me all the rooms and as we looked
at the tidy and lifeless bedrooms – his, those of his wife, his daughter,
and her family – he very directly asked me to go to bed with him.
The surroundings being so clean and the situation so straight made it
very easy to refuse. There was no bodily contact at all, and my primary
reaction was of slight pity for this old man, who accepted my refusal
just as plain as he had posed the question. Then we went down to the
huge kitchen/living room where he offered Raki, the strong, Turkish
alcoholic drink. My thoughts turned to the trip down the mountain
in the car, and I suggested we leave for the restaurant. He assured me
that we were going there afterwards, but now we would have a drink
on the terrace. So we went out on the terrace with a wonderful view
over the dark Mediterranean Sea with lights shining from various spots
in the hilly landscape, he with a large Raki, me with a small.
Maybe the Raki helped me; I was not sweating with fear as we drove
down the mountain, and I forced myself to think about studies on
the importance of embodied experience in old drivers (Hansen and
Hansen, 2002; Kirk, 2012) even though these studies did not include
anything about alcohol intake. And now it was dark. While driving
along the highway, Howard expressed worry that he could not find the
restaurant. He was not sure if it was shut down, but he assured me he
had been there lots of times during the years he had stayed in Turkey.
Finally, he found the fish restaurant, and we spent some hours eating
a delicious dinner. During the meal, Howard told me his life history
and showed me pictures from ‘his memory’ – the thick notebook.
In the fish restaurant, Howard told me about his career as a young
sports hero. Cuttings from newspaper journals in ‘his memory’
documented him as a proud, tall and handsome winner from the
204
middle of the 20th century. Then he became the owner of a successful

company. Other newspaper cuttings revealed specific events in which
he had participated, dressed in a white suit with broad lapels in the
1970s. The presentation he made for me was clearly an arranged
performance, organised as a persuasive plot of success, and its steady
(and paper documented) components testified to the impression of a
well-polished and repeated life story. It was clear from his story that he
had been a popular figure among the Danes in Turkey. However, since
I, a trained life history interviewer, kept asking him more questions
about his life, he also diverged from the strict storyline of the newspaper
cuttings and told other stories from his life, even though he did not
remember all the details he would have wanted to tell. For instance,
he talked about his family, and revealed that his wife had always been
angry with him because of his recurrent adultery. He told me that he
liked to come down and spend time in his house in Turkey once in
a while to amuse himself, but that he actually felt quite lonely. Once
again, he asked if I would go home with him after dinner. As he drove
me back to my own car, he admitted that his loss of memory was
worrisome for him, and that he felt kind of lonely here.
The erotic encounter as a methodology of embodied

interaction
My encounter with Howard was far from erotic, though that was
maybe an intention of his. But Marks’ ‘erotic encounter’ implies an
analytical approach to our embodied interaction which can bestow an
understanding conveyed by means of three analytical aspects: ‘touch’,
‘embodied map’, and ‘materialised mind’.
Touch
The most salient bodily impression in me was my fright of being a

victim of Howard’s (lack of) driving abilities, which resulted in an
explicit physical reaction in me; I lost control indeed of my body by
sweating and considering skipping out of the car. Reversely, my bodily
presence did not seem to influence Howard’s body much. Verbally, he
pronounced a bodily desire, but his body did not send a congruent
signal. Moreover as I, verbally as well, tried to influence his bodily
intake of alcohol, I had no success, though the possible consequences
of this scared me and constituted a risk to my person – and to his.
This embodied encounter with Howard can be read as erotic in terms
of Marks’ definition (Marks, 2002), since I fearfully lost control of my
205
body, but ‘came back into possession of language and personhood’.

The interaction also represented a relation between me, him and the
external world, since this experience resulted in my worries about
him driving about in his car while he was alone in Turkey. Could this
driving result in risk, either for himself or for other people? These
considerations represent an oscillation between embodied encounter,
and observation and reflection from a distance; between past tense
related to his experience, present tense related to my immediate
fear, and future tense related to my reflections and worries about his
whereabouts.
The situation was, however, not quite similar to an ‘amoeba-like’
reaction, as Marks calls it (see the earlier quote from Marks, 2002,
p 203), because neither of us were performing a mimetic reaction of
each other’s. Contrary to me, Howard kept very calm in front of the
fence; it was apparently an ordinary situation for him. The ‘ordinary’,
however, is a multi-layered term. What was ordinary for Howard was of
course not ordinary for me. Ordinariness varies in a temporal manner
as well; what was previously ordinary for Howard was not all that
ordinary for him any longer. His mind was no longer as it used to be.
His difficulty in finding the well-known restaurant was an indicator of
this problem. As a passenger I could sense the tenseness in him while
he was driving, just as well as I could understand cognitively from his
talk about the ‘disappeared’ restaurant.
Embodied map
When Laura Marks writes about the haptic, she refers to Deleuze and
Guatarri’s description of ‘smooth space’ which has no clear demarcation
and resembles ephemeral spaces, like deserts in permanent transition.
Navigating in such spaces requires a nomadic ability combining visual
and tactile senses. The smooth space must be bodily experienced as
well as being envisioned from well-known sites and signs. The routes
and their signs are imprinted in the body, which creates a kind of
embodied map complementing or substituting a printed map. Howard
was trying to follow this embodied map, which used to be part of his
daily life when in Turkey; he had certain routes and routines obtained
from his experiences after many years as a seasonal resident there.
There is no account of any diagnosis of dementia in this story, which
was not part of the outspoken encounter between Howard and me.
Only the loss of memory was a candid subject. However, even at
the early and still unexplained outset of this diagnosis, loss of spatial
orientation is recognised as a problem (Swane, 1996), and this may
206
involve cartographic as well as embodied mapping. Howard’s preferred

routes and actions while living in Turkey were inscribed in his bodily
routines (in cooperation with his car) as a recognisable pattern, and
the structure of this embodied map seemed now to dissolve. This
confused his mind and disturbed his embodied interaction with his car
and the places he once knew very well: the roads along the sea. The
anthropologist Keith Basso (1995, p 7) wrote about place making; the
making sense of place, which involves a construction of the past, of
social traditions, but also personal and social identities. While trying to
find his places and follow his routes in Turkey, Howard was also trying
to keep up the life he had enjoyed here. He was trying to keeping it
in existence; including dimensions of his experiences, his social life
and his personal identity.
Sarah Pink (2007) discusses the term ‘shared corporeal experiences’
as a specific, methodological approach when the ethnographer follows
a person of interest. Sharing is of course not 100% possible, but
according to a classic, hermeneutical perspective focusing on partial
access to intersubjective experience, the corporeal following of another
person can provide an embodied sensory understanding for this person.
With me as an amoeba-like person next to Howard in the car, in his
house, and in the restaurant as well, he invited me to sense, absorb
and comprehend his routes and his preferred places in Turkey. I also
encountered Howard’s attempt to maintain his embodied map; the
smooth space of this former life as an active, wealthy retired migrant in
Turkey, including the habits of acting as a playboy and being unfaithful
to his wife. In a lifecourse perspective, this indicates an understanding
of his previous life as a retired migrant, but it also granted a present
time impression of his slight bewilderment due to decline in memory.
The signs of a slipping smooth space do not only indicate a spatial
phenomenon, but also signify a mental state and a personal loss.
Materialised memory
The idea of materials as a matter of the lifeworld is presented by post-

phenomenology, building on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy about an
evaporation of dichotomous distinctions between body and world. The
anthropologist Tim Ingold (2007) emphasises that the material and its
properties have interacting significance for human life. The material
case in question here is Howard’s notebook, which he clearly designates
vital importance by coining it ‘My Memory’ and by keeping it by his
side at all times. In line with phenomenological thinking, Howard tries
to eliminate any gap between his body and his materialised ‘memory’,
207
which is full of objects reminding him of his lifelong experiences.

When Laura Marks writes about haptic senses, she considers Gilles
Deleuze’s term ‘objects of experience’ (Marks, 2002, p xv). Such
objects can seem to represent simple and even ideal meanings, and yet,
if studied meticulously, they can simultaneously contain particularities
implying a variety of connotations. Howard’s notebook is filled with
materialised objects of experience, representing particularities from
his life, all helping him to reconstruct his lifestory in a way distinct
from everyone else’s. At the same time, these particularities constitute
strong pillars in a firm story, which, on the other hand, seems idealised
and designates a kind of uni-linear lifestory of Howard. However, as
I interrogate and challenge him with more questions, he is capable of
grasping other stories that do not necessarily contribute nicely to the
typified storyline. This other narrated helical and non-linear storyline
affects his disposition to represent a more complex person; a human
being with problems and worries, like his wife being angry with him
and him worrying about his memory loss.
Thus, the materialised memory operates as a prosthesis for mental
capacity – and identity – by providing Howard with the necessary
elements of the storyline to keep track of the whole, and by illustrating
and documenting. The book is also used as a materialised medium
between him, telling his story, and his audience. When he tells his
story, this engenders a connection between him and his interlocutor;
his remembrance enables him to nurture his membership in social
relationships (Kenyon and Randall, 1997). The opposite effect is also
an option, namely that the materialised memory effaces Howard’s
abilities to sustain his more complex lifestory – and identity – because
the strong pillars of specific details, the newspaper cuttings, tend to
displace his remembrance of other elements in his lifestory – those that
are not materialised and are hence more vague. Such elements may
easily become misty, dim, and disappear in the shade of the materialised
objects of experience. According to Paul Ricoeur’s narrative theory,
narrating is a vital human act, as a social activity, configuring and
reconfiguring relationships between human beings. It is also a temporal
activity, configuring and reconfiguring every narrating person in a
world of past and present narratives. Furthermore, it is an existential
activity, configuring and reconfiguring a narrating self by means of
creating personal, narrative time, which is a temporal moment in the
cosmic, perpetual time (Ricoeur, 1990; 2010a; 2010b). Following
this line of thought, Howard’s narrating is important, whether it is
complex and curved, or steady and singular, because the act of narrating
is an act of clutching hold of time – and clutching hold of life; by
208
constructing narrative time, Howard is steering clear of cosmic time –

he is staying alive. Howard’s materialised memory, his notebook, serves
as a prosthesis of mental capacity and identity, and keeps him alive both
socially and existentially. Methodologically, this materialisation of a
mind also works as a tool for improvement of understanding through
creating interaction between researcher and the investigated person(s).
Co-construction and the role of the researcher

The three examples of analyses have shown how sensing can contribute
to understanding other people’s way of making sense. Following the
post-phenomenological lead, the idea of this haptic methodology is to
provide a sense and an understanding of the challenges experienced by a
mobile person by the end of his lifecourse while challenged by memory
loss. This understanding is conveyed by disintegrating the distinction
between subject and object/body and mind; and by incorporating
a sensuous theory and a cultural analysis of touch, embodied map
and materialised memory. The methodology primarily focuses on
embodied interaction. The a priori premise is that knowledge is
co-constructed; the researcher is always inherently involved in the
process. There is no ideal of objectivity embedded in this methodology;
contrarily the embodied and subjective part of the researcher is seen
as a necessity for obtaining interaction and understanding. In the case
of Howard, none of the presented analyses would have existed had
the researcher not interacted with him, which entailed an embodied
impression of his driving and living, an orientation into his navigating
in his Turkish ‘smooth space’, and a presentation of the documents of
his ‘materialised memory’. Testifying to the haptic epistemology of
mutual touch, the events described would not even have happened
without the presence of the researcher. Howard’s incentive to invite
me for dinner was prompted by his interaction with me, and this
was furthermore in congruence with previous actions of his. He was
buttressing his customs and habits of going out with women; taking
them home, to the fish restaurant, following the same routes as he was
reconfiguring with me. In this embodied way, it is possible to learn
about his previous life in the country of his second home, connecting
past and present time, and it also enlightens his present bewilderment,
trying to make sense and maintaining his preferred way of living.
209
Knowledge and ethics

With this analysis, the intention has been to interrogate the
methodological process of embodied interaction. The empirical
study involves the experiences of Danish elderly migrants in the
Southern European regions. Most IRM studies have focused on living
situation, motivations for moving, national identity and social life. The
population that chooses to migrate is often termed ‘affluent’ or ‘third
age’ (Warnes et al, 2004; Simpson, 2015), connoting a pleasant, active
retirement life. However, as age passes by, most people become frail
in different ways, but only few IRM studies include investigations of
what consequences this may have for people who have chosen a life
considerably more influenced by mobility than the life of most other
retirees. In this chapter, the focus is on a fairly wealthy person, who
has a wife and a house in Denmark. The life situation of other retired
migrants might be more complicated regarding financial opportunities,
living situation, social life, functional decline, etc. However, Howard
has his worries; he feels lonely, and his mind is in decline. Hence, this
chapter gives an insight into the end of the lifecourse of a man who
is struggling to maintain his way of living in a place where mobility
interferes negatively with decline in old age.
One may wonder about the ethical consequences of my encounter
with Howard. As described, Howard actually did reveal some secrets
for me in our conversations, and I disclosed, among other things in
this chapter, that he was feeling lonely. It was clear that his situation
had changed from being a lively and popular person, to a person who
is forgetful and lonely, having trouble finding his way in the landscape,
mentally as well as cartographically. His rendezvous with me could
have enhanced this feeling of social and mental decline, since I refused
him and his wishes, probably reminding him of lost popularity and
status. This is an unsolvable problem in ethnography; testifying to the
idea of the embodied interaction, which of course not only involves
the ethnographer, but also the people we study. Ethnographers may
reconcile themselves while calling attention to phenomena – drawing
on the epistemological valuing on sense and sentiment – and hoping
that the insight, such as that about geographies at the end of the
lifecourse from a study like this, also involves you, the reader, and
provides us all with a better understanding of spatial aspects of later
life in a frail context.
210
Conclusion
This chapter has presented a methodological approach to embodied
interaction, inspired by haptic epistemology, which is informed by post-
phenomenologic, sensuous theory. The empirical case is an 83-year-old
Danish man who is a double home-owner in Turkey, used to travelling
between the two countries. Howard is in a process of mental decline,
and the methodologies applied in the chapter exemplify how to
understand responses to frailty and decline in the lifecourse, when the
life situation is influenced by mobility. A premise of co-constructing
knowledge is at the core of the employed methodology, emphasising
the impact of interaction between researcher and the people studied.
There is no ideal of objectivity embedded in this methodology;
contrarily, the embodied and subjective part of the researcher is seen
as a bedrock for interaction and human understanding, propelling
access to interpretations of sense making and lived experience at the
end of the lifecourse.
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diversity and welfare of older migrants in Europe’, Ageing and Society,
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213
TWELVE
Event history approach to life spaces

in French-speaking research
Françoise Dureau, Matthieu Giroud and Christophe Imbert
Introduction1
The study of spatial mobility in European social sciences suffers from
institutional and thematic segmentation (daily mobility, tourism,
residential mobility, migration). However, a growing number
of studies have shown that a comprehensive, linked approach to
mobility is an effective way of capturing hybrid practices that fall
between residential and daily mobility (such as multiple residences
and long-distance commuting: Dupont and Dureau, 1994; Lévy
and Dureau, 2002; Kaufmann and Vincent-Geslin, 2012). This
approach can be used to focus more on the multi-local dimension
of individuals’ spatial practices across the lifecourse. Living in more
than one place at once is a topic addressed by a number of French-
speaking geographers, who have invented various expressions for it:
‘habiter multilocal’ (Duchêne-Lacroix, 2011), ‘habiter polytopique’
(Stock, 2004), ‘espaces de vie polycentriques’ (Lelièvre and Robette,
2006), ‘ancrages multiples’ (Imbert, 2005), and for multiple residences
specifically, ‘système résidentiel’ (Dureau, 2002) are conceptual attempts
to capture the attachment of one individual to more than one place.
All these conceptual proposals distance themselves de facto from a
Heideggerian vision that favours sedentarity and even putting down
roots exclusively in one place; this ultimately helped prolong and
extend the theoretical and methodological debates in 1970s French
social geography concerning the concept of ‘life space’ (for example,
Chevalier, 1974; Frémont, 1974).
In this chapter, we show how such a comprehensive linked approach
to mobility is useful for understanding the life space of an individual
as a set of places that have gradually become incorporated over their
lifecourse, often involving changes of function and kinds of attachment
to places (for instance, a holiday home becomes a main home, or
215
vice versa) (Poulain, 1983). Using an inventory of 50 years of French

research into residential mobility, we focus first on studies that bring
a greater understanding of life space dynamics. We take residential
mobility to mean any change of dwelling, whatever the distance
involved. We show how data collection methods and theoretical
frameworks have changed since 1950. Our hypothesis is that empirical
experience has improved the theoretical debate concerning residential
mobility. The rise of the lifecourse approach has shown that residence
may be multi-located, and has also played a key role in understanding
residential choices and the mobility they involve. The second and third
sections present the methodological discussion of data collection and
analysis in the Mobilités entre métropoles européennes et reconfiguration des
espaces de vie (MEREV) research programme funded by the French
Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) from 2007 to 2010. This sought
to capture how groups practising circular mobility restructure their life
spaces in terms of their use of these spaces and the meanings they give
to them. The programme examined how these circulations, and the life
spaces involved, are adopted over an individual’s lifecourse. Our second
section describes the methodological choices we made for capturing
this gradual construction of life spaces over a lifetime. The last section
presents various options for analysing the data and selected findings.
It especially demonstrates the degree of complexity of the systems of
places observed and its variation over an individual’s lifetime, but also
the key role played by family issues to explain such evolutions.
From migration to life spaces: French research using the

lifecourse approach to residential mobility
An overview of lifecourse surveys of residential mobility can be based
on the research of the Groupe de Recherche sur l’Approche Biographique
(GRAB, 1999). We updated this work during the MEREV project
(Dureau and Imbert, 2014). Before presenting the advances made in
recent decades, we recapitulate the principles of the lifecourse approach
as developed in demography.
The creation of knowledge concerning residential mobility in the
broadest sense, namely all changes of dwelling, whatever the distance
involved, is not a new concern. However, the focus has varied in
time and space as population behaviour and social demand have
developed: after long concentrating on migration into towns and its
effects on population distribution within a country, more attention
is now paid to intra-urban mobility and its relationship with unequal
access to resources (Bonvalet and Brun, 2002). The ways in which this
216
knowledge has been created have also changed considerably in line with
theoretical developments in each of the disciplines involved. At present
more or less all social sciences create some knowledge about residential
mobility. In demography, this is a relatively recent phenomenon: for
many years, demographic analysis did not attribute any real status
to migration, seen as merely an element confounding fertility and
mortality. Residential mobility, considered as a shared field involving
continual exchanges between various disciplines concerned with urban
research, probably contributed to the result now observable in French
social sciences: an extensive use of life histories and biographies, cutting
across the usual theoretical divisions between and within disciplines
(Bertaux, 1980, p 202). This interest, going beyond the ‘biographical
sensibility’ noted by Demazière and Samuel (2010, p 2), is so strong as
to appear suspect: the lifecourse approach is apparently being reduced
to the characteristics of the material collected (an individual’s lifestory
since birth, including its various aspects), while omitting the theoretical
presuppositions that justified the collection of the data (Godard, 1996).
A brief summary of past developments in demographic paradigms is
essential to grasp the purposes of lifecourse data collection.
In an article published in 2002, Daniel Courgeau recalled that it
was during the 18th and 19th centuries that the transversal (or cross-
sectional) approach, considering events occurring at a given time,
prevailed over the longitudinal approach that analyses events occurring
over individuals’ lifetimes (Courgeau, 2002, p 50). The introduction
of population censuses at the end of the 18th century supported the
transversal approach, which remained predominant until after the
Second World War. In the 1950s, there emerged the principles of
aggregated longitudinal analysis by cohorts: its basic hypothesis was
the independence of demographic phenomena, each to be studied
‘in its pure form’ in populations deemed to be homogeneous. Thirty
years later, in the early 1980s, a new approach to individual behaviour
emerged in demography. The unit of analysis was no longer the event,
but the individual life history.
The new paradigm can be approached by the following

postulate: throughout his or her life, an individual follows
a complex trajectory, which, at any given point in time,
is dependent on his life history to date, the information
he has accumulated in the past … (Courgeau, 2002, p 63)
This new, clearly individualistic, paradigm differs radically from

the methodological holism of the cross-sectional and aggregated
217
longitudinal approaches. It can be used to directly address a central

question: the interactions between demographic phenomena. For
instance, entering adulthood may be considered as a complex set of
reversible transitions comprising the residential autonomy and the
beginning of both professional and marital lives. The main limitation of
the life history approach thus described soon appeared: it only explains
individual behaviour by that individual’s characteristics, and omits the
contexts within which individual actions occur (family, district, region,
etc.). To reduce this risk of the ‘atomistic fallacy’, a further development
followed in the methods of life history analysis, using contextual
models, then multi-level models, which introduce characteristics
aggregated at various levels to explain individual behaviour. Although
problems remain before these models can be fully operational, they do
already present a quite novel position in demography that has the value
of overcoming the contradictions between individualism and holism:
… the behaviour of an individual is still considered to

depend on his or her past history … [but] can also depend
on the external constraints that weigh on the individual,
and of which he or she may not be aware. (Courgeau,
2002, p 71)
It also has the advantage of ‘replacing the notion of causality by the

more flexible concept of local dependency that makes it possible to
come closer to the interactions between phenomena’ (Courgeau,
1988). One may now envisage a demographic analysis of individual
event histories situated within multiple spaces, and introduce multiple
timeframes into the analysis (Courgeau, 2002, p 72, p 74).
Since the event history approach has been used in demography,
the methods for creating and analysing information have significantly
diversified and been gradually improved. Data collection procedures
have altered in line with the objectives and geographical and social
setting of surveys, and major changes in the conceptualisation of:
i) individual mobility behaviours, taken in a contextual or multi-
level approach, taking account of individuals’ sociability networks;
ii) individuals’ relationships with places, recognising the multi-local
nature of spatial practices and mutual relationships between the various
scales of mobility; and iii) individual trajectories, initially conceived as
a succession of binary states defined by instantaneous transitions and
now seen as complex states involving different timeframes. All these
are factors that have contributed to changes in the methodologies for
producing event history information of growing complexity.
218
In this chapter we focus on how the multi-local nature of residence

has been integrated into event histories. The event history data
collection in Colombia and India in the early 1990s, analysed in
GRAB (1999), made it possible to ‘zoom’ in on an event history, as
long as certain precautions were observed: choice of ‘a short, recent
period’; ‘preceding the event history data collection’; ‘confined to
identifying work or residential situations that were irregular, unstable
or intermittent, experience by particular respondents at the time of the
survey (with a question filtering out such respondents)’ (GRAB, 1999,
p 51). The solution found for the Bogotá (1993) and Casanare (1996)
surveys (Dureau and Flórez, 1999, p 252), and applied elsewhere (Cali,
Tijuana, Delhi), was used again in the late 2000s for the METAL2 and
Mesure des mobilités spatiales sahéliennes3 surveys. The data collection
procedure carefully adopted the principle of biographical matrices: all
the places where the respondent has resided in the 12 months preceding
the survey are recorded on a month-by-month matrix. The table is
only completed for those respondents who have lived in more than
one place in the previous year. A maximum of two residences other
than the survey residence are included; for a place to be taken as a
component in the respondent’s residential system, a minimum period
of residence is required (in the METAL surveys, 30 consecutive or
non-consecutive days during the previous year).
All the experience since the 1990s confirms the effectiveness of the
proposed solution for the period immediately preceding the survey:
the graphical presentation of stays in various dwellings (or various jobs)
provides a finely-grained picture of respondents’ ‘residential systems’,
both simple and complex, as defined by all the dwellings occupied by
a respondent during the year, and the length and frequency of their
stays in each one. The complex residential situations thus revealed may
correspond to phases of transition: a leaving home process spread over
months or longer, with alternate residence independently and in the
parents’ home, or a transitory period for a respondent before the rest of
their family moves away, etc. Multi-residence, we defined as regularly
frequenting different dwellings in addition to the ‘main’ home, may
become a long-term practice: this is clearly a complex situation that
needs to be recognised as such, via adequate procedures for collecting
and recording information. While not only important to an individual’s
lifecourse, this data can also be relevant to produce knowledge on the
population of some territories (such as rural or touristic areas) affected
by the variations over time of practices of multi-residence. How then
is this complexity of residential systems to be captured for the whole
of an individual’s residential trajectory?
219
Individuals circulating between European metropolises:

a lifecourse approach to life spaces and data collection
issues
On the basis of this evidence, we proposed a method for collecting the
life space trajectories of people circulating within Europe. Their life
spaces are explicitly recorded in their multi-scale dimensions: territory
of daily life, the entire metropolis where the main residence is located,
network of places lived in, or all reference places whether lived in or
not. Our objectives included identifying the major types of circular
mobility in their space and time dimensions and inequality in these
movements; understanding how the practice of circulating developed
over time, within individuals’ lifecourses; developing explanatory
models to reveal the specific factors behind the restructuring of life
spaces; observing how individuals perceive their urban activities and
practices, and also the functioning of their family life at the level of
their space of circulation.
The survey involved three data collection phases. The first consisted
of finding ‘circulators’ in such likely places as airports, railway stations
and bus stations. In order to identify various types of circulation, the
questionnaire, given to 600 people, covered travel outside the city of
residence during the previous year. We defined circulators at this step
as persons who visited at another place at least twice during the 12
months before the survey. Our purpose was to examine the various
forms of circulation identified as ‘multi-located’ ways of living, varying
from single professional trips to having a second home. The second
survey phase focused on 56 individuals taken from the first phase,
including 40 identified as ‘circulators’. As we shall see in detail, the
information to be collected during this phase mainly concerned these
individuals and their systems of mobility. In the third phase, 16 of the
40 ‘circulators’ who answered the second questionnaire took part in
semi-structured interviews. The purpose of these interviews was to
examine representations of circulation and the places lived in to allow
an understanding of both the feelings (pleasure, hardship) associated
with such practices of mobility and the meanings allocated of these
places, and thus to go further into the interpretation of the dynamics
of the life spaces.
The second phase of the survey is the most important for our
interest in the lifecourse approach to life spaces. Three main sets of
data concerning individuals’ mobility were targeted: their life space
and system of places frequented at the time of the survey, recorded
in two sorts of mobility (ways of frequenting a place) – between
220
European metropolises and within a given metropolis; their residential,

professional and ‘circulation’ biography (places previously lived
in regularly and for some time) to understand how the system of
places frequented at the time of the survey had been built up; their
representation of these cities and the places they lived in and how they
moved through space and time.
The questionnaire used during this second phase comprises five
modules designed on the basis of previous research experience. The first
is conventional and concerns the identification of the questionnaire.
The second concerns the characteristics of dwellings occupied by
the respondent in the previous 12 months: in order to record the
exact location and housing conditions in the metropolises visited and
verify the timetable of stays established in the first phase survey, the
respondent is asked to state and describe the dwellings he occupied in
the 12 months preceding the survey. The third focuses on daily mobility
behaviour in the metropolises included in the system of places. The
aim is to record the respondent’s current system of places with closer
observation of the places frequented within the cities frequented. The
fourth, an open-ended module, addresses the representation of the life
space where the respondent is asked to consider their relationship with
the world and more specifically their ways of seeing the cities they
frequent and to identify themselves with spatial categories (from own
home to world). The fifth is a biographical module (see Figure 12.1)
that comprises the respondent’s residential, professional and educational
trajectories since birth. It also includes outline biographies of their
families: parents, spouses and children with dates of birth and death
and periods of co-residence with the respondent. To determine how
their system of places had been constructed, the individual’s residential
trajectory was recorded not only in relation to their other types of
trajectory (family, professional) by the standard event history approach
(see also Del Bianco, this volume), but also with the dynamics of the
system of places frequented during their lives (second homes, places
regularly frequented, ‘striking’ or key places even if rarely frequented,
places of work). One of the questionnaire’s innovations is that it
attempts to collect all episodes of multi-residence since birth. Such a
methodological choice was inspired by experience with two research
surveys. In the survey questionnaire for ‘Spatial mobility in Yopal,
Aguazul, Tauramena’ (see Dureau and Flórez, 1999),4 the key point
in data collection for individuals’ systems of residence is presentation
in a timeline of stays in various dwellings during the previous year.
The second survey is entitled ‘Biographies and contact circle’ (see
Bonvalet and Lelièvre, 2012).5 The biographical module of the survey
221
Figure 12.1: Biographical matrix used to record multi-residence trajectories
Notes: The extra places of residence

throughout the lifecourse are collected in
the questionnaire in two steps: 1) places
where the interviewed person spent at
least 30 nights a year (part 2.E ‘Periodos
de multiresidência’); and 2) other places
considered as noticeable to cite despite less
time spent there (part 2.F ‘Outros lugares’).
This segmentation into two steps was
introduced in order to get a full sense of
places lived and visited. The questions can be
translated as:
222
2.E: ‘have you stayed more than 30 nights
per years in an accommodation outside your
place of residence at some different moments
of your life? If Yes, could you tell me where,
when and why (professional, educational
reasons, touristic trips, social relations, family

stay, others)?’
2.F: ‘in addition to these places could you

indicate other places you have stayed in, with
no considerations of the number of nights. If
yes, could you tell me where, when and why
(professional, educational reasons, touristic
trips, social relations, family stay, others)?
Source: MEREV Lisbon survey 2009

questionnaire contains a question about ‘other places frequented’,

which are often for holidays (campsite, hotel, holiday rental, friend or
family member’s home, etc.).
In order to achieve as exhaustive a collection as possible of places that
form the system of places since birth, although this is an inaccessible
ideal, two phases were designed. First, we took the 30-day threshold
and extended it to the respondent’s entire biography so as to record all
the ‘places frequented for at least 30 days, whether consecutively or not’
for each year of their lives. The idea in setting a threshold of duration
is to activate the individual’s memory of the places they frequented.
Second, ‘other places frequented’ were recorded (see Figure 12.1). For
each place mentioned, the respondent was asked the reason or reasons
for frequenting it (work, leisure, family, social relations, other).
The collection phase appears to have gone well and feedback from
the interviewers indicates that the question was easily understood by
the respondents. Of the 56 people interviewed, 49 reported at least
one period of multi-residence, 36 at least two and 19 at least four. The
locations were identified almost at a communal level for Europe; for
locations within the central municipalities of the project’s European
metropolises, use of a city map was effective. One of the successes of
this questionnaire is that it demonstrated that it is possible to collect
multi-residence data for an entire lifetime. The other places mentioned,
other than the multi-residence ones, were generally covered just as
effectively, except that the reasons given for frequenting them were less
systematically recorded. Furthermore, the semi-structured interviews
in the third phase of the survey (with 16 of the 56 respondents) were
highly useful not only for completing the missing data but also in
providing more accurate information about multi-location trajectories.
However, it must be stressed that the details of systems of places we
have at the lifetime level do not include the amount of time spent in those
places. The reason is that during this sort of event history survey it is
difficult to accurately capture this aspect because individuals vary widely
in their ability to recall how long they spent in one place or another over
time. Consequently, any description of circulation practice based on this
reading of variations in systems of frequented places can only be partial.
Furthermore, although the effort of memory required of the respondent
must be seen as a complex exercise in recreating and representing
their system(s) of places during their lifetime, it amounts in practice
to an act of recreation and representation of reality, during which the
individual’s selection of places reported is guided by a range of factors
driven both by their cognitive capacities and the survey procedure.
We consider it important to stress that the details given of systems of
223
places probably reflect as much the representations of those places –

those that most ‘struck’ the individual and still remain with them – as
actual behaviour. This in no way undermines the value of the analysis
made, but should suggest a certain caution in interpreting its results.
Individuals circulating between European metropolises: a

lifecourse approach to life spaces and data analysis choices
The biographical information concerning places frequented was
analysed in two ways: one focusing on the number of places other
than the main place of residence, the other dealing with the status for
the respondent of the places frequented. The first approach, purely
quantitative and based on the number of places, examined the degree of
complexity of the systems of places and its variation over an individual’s
lifetime: a succession or alternation of phases of complexification
and simplification. For instance, Figure 12.1 shows the variation and
progressive complexity of the system of places frequented by Sergio
over lifetime. Sergio was born in Lisbon in 1967 and lived there with
his parents until 1996. Throughout this period, he experienced multi-
residence with Oliveira do Hospital, located in central Portugal, where
his parents are from. After his wedding, he moved with his wife in
the periphery of Lisbon, first in Sintra in 1996 and then in Oeiras in
1998 when Sergio became Chief Financial Officer of a multinational
toys company. European circulations of Sergio intensify gradually with
increasing professional responsibilities: from 1996 to 1999, he regularly
visits Munich, then after 1999, Barcelona; and from 2002 to 2004, he
practices bi-residence between Lisbon and Amsterdam.
The other approach sought to understand the meaning in the
frequentation of these places and the sense of the variations in the
system of places: this analysis focused on qualifying, as accurately as
possible within the limitations of the quality of data collected in Phases
1 and 2, the status of each of the places frequented by the respondents in
our sample (Table 12.1). The status is fixed by analysing questionnaire
by questionnaire (sometimes by returning additionally to third phase’s
interviews) what role(s) each place has played in the life courses
(professional, family origins related, family migrations related, holiday
home).In each of these analyses, the data were processed in three
stages: i) characterisation, year by year, of the status of each individual’s
system of places; ii) analysis of the transitions between statuses; iii)
characterisation of the whole trajectory, that is, the succession of states
from birth to the time of the survey.
224
Table 12.1: Status of places frequented
Code Status of place frequented

Place of origin that is not a former place of residence, frequented for various
A
reasons (family, leisure, social relations)
B Former place of residence, whatever the reason of frequentation
Place that is neither the place of origin nor a former place of residence,
C
frequented for reasons of leisure or (close) family ties
D frequented for reasons of work or study (whether or not related to a change in
occupational status)
Place that is neither the place of origin nor a former place of residence, where
E a member of the close or extended family lives who has migrated or moved
(including after separation or divorce) or is circulating for professional reasons
F
frequented to visit relatives by marriage (spouse living abroad, in laws)
For example, when analysing the number of places, characterising their

status consists of merely counting the number of places frequented year
by year, whether this is multi-residence (2-E) or not (2-F) (Figure 12.1).
This analytical view, year by year, of the system of places frequented
over an individual’s lifetime is completed by an overarching approach:
correspondence analysis followed by ranking.
The seven resulting classes, ranked by increasing complexity of system
of places, can be plotted as trajectories (Robette, 2011) of successive
places coded for status and then ranked by the file recording the number
of places frequented (in addition to the main residence) each year by
each of the 56 members of the sample (Figure 12.2):
Class 1: 15 individuals who had very simple systems of places

throughout their lives (no or virtually no place regularly frequented
other than their place of residence); more than 80% of their lives
did not include another frequented place and the average number
of other places frequented during their lives is 0.17.
Class 2: 12 individuals who frequented only their place of residence

during half of the years recorded and, during the other half, one
place other than their main residence; giving an average number of
places frequented of 0.6.
Class 3: Seven individuals who spent most of their lives with one

place frequented other than their place of residence, giving an
average number of places frequented of 1.2.
Class 4: Eight individuals with more complex trajectories. Their

average number of places, only slightly higher than Class 3 (1.33)
225
Figure 12.2: Number of places frequented other than main residence, by age and
trajectory class
Source: MEREV Lisbon survey 2009
is due to a succession of highly diversified coded statuses: from one

place frequented other than the main residence to, in one case, six
places.
Class 5: Five individuals who spent most of their lives in two

places: their average of two over a lifetime is significantly higher
than for Class 4. They comprise three individuals under 30 who
correspond closely to this situation; and two slightly older ones
whose system of places had become more complex recently (three
places frequented) as illustrated by Sergio’s case. The transitions
between complexification and simplification of systems of places
are highly varied.
Class 6: Five individuals whose systems of places have seen

increasing complexification, like some in Class 5. But the Class 6
complexification is more marked (from one place in youth to three
or more later) than Class 5 (from two places in youth to three later),
so their average is higher (2.47).
Class 7: Three individuals with the most complex systems of places,

namely five or more places during two-thirds of their years of life,
giving an average of 5.2.
This initial classification can be used to explore the variety of dynamics

in systems of places. The crossing of this analysis with the contents of
semi-structured interviews is very helpful to reveal what is at stake in
processes of simplification, stabilisation and complexification of life
spaces. To understand these processes, we simultaneously examined
226
individual context (individual’s lifecourse dynamics), family context

(own family and/or in laws), and, in some cases, macrostructural
context (such as economic crisis or Portugal’s migration history). After
a qualitative analysis of the event histories collected and interviews
held, we identified five sets of cases that involved either addition or
removal of places frequented: long-distance migration; spatial mobility
of family members and dispersal of family reference points; relationship
with place of origin; frequentation of places for leisure or holidays;
frequentation of places for work. We found that these various cases
may quite well be observed within a single individual’s lifecourse, as
illustrated by the case of Sergio. Where this happens, the effects on
the configuration of systems of places are combined, either enhancing
or outweighing each other. As we can indeed see with Sergio the
abandonment (since he is married) of Oliveira do Hospital, as a place of
frequentation, appears to be largely offset by his practice of bi-residence
with Amsterdam and by a diversification of his travels towards different
European cities (Munich, Barcelona).
The factors that modify life spaces may in fact be general ones,
revealing the impact of economic or political structural constraints
(such as Portugal’s history of internal and international migration), a
country’s delayed economic opening up, the effects of economic crisis
on particular sectors (multinationals’ location and operational strategies)
or social constraints (qualifications and occupation; social relationships
of gender). But they may also be due to more personal choices
and strategies largely dependent on individual sociodemographic
characteristics (age, gender), point in lifecourse trajectory (stage in
training or career; stage in residential trajectory) or marital or family
status. Our analyses confirm the decisive role of family and family
changes in the modification of systems of places frequented and
therefore the definition of life spaces throughout a lifetime. Analysis of
the status of these places showed that, overall, few places are frequented
for other than family purposes and reasons: few are frequented for
strictly professional or educational reasons independent of any family
purpose (which does not mean that the family question does not
arise). In addition, we noted the impact on circulation behaviour of
the bonds maintained with one’s place of family origin, changes in
marital status and a new set of in laws, having or not having children,
family migration history, dispersal of family members (parents, siblings,
children), occupational move by spouse, the habit of spending family
holidays in certain places, etc.
227
Conclusion
The MEREV research reinforced the idea that it is both possible and
productive to collect data on an individual’s relations or attachments to
places within a biographical matrix. Admittedly, it would be excessive
to seek to exhaustively record all the places an individual lived in over a
lifetime. Our experience does show, however, that the places frequented
regularly or at length for part of an individual’s life appear to be quite
easily recalled, so that it is possible to collect a set of places whose
frequentation has actually affected individuals’ daily lives, whether
because of family, relationship or occupational changes. Analysis of
these data, however, reveals difficulties related to the complexity of the
geographical information. But the twofold analysis proposed, of both
the number and status of the places frequented, has made it possible
to reveal a wide diversity of configurations and dynamics of systems
of places, which we have sought to organise and classify by producing
trajectory typologies.
By focusing on the idea of ‘life space trajectories’, this chapter
contributes to the latest developments in lifecourse research. It shows
that we have methodological tools, both to collect and analyse, to
produce knowledge on the dynamic of complex situations such as
multi-residence; but also to allow a better understanding on the
constitution of individual life spaces and systems of mobility over
time. Besides, by revealing how individuals can be durably attached
to different places in which they simultaneously stay, this approach
uncovers how people who do not live permanently in a place can
contribute to local dynamics (housing market, amenities and services,
image of the place). So individual lifecourse trajectories, besides being
an effective tool for studying mobility and migration, can also shed
light on the changing aspects of living environments.
Notes
 
1
This text includes material already published in Chapters 1, 4 and 5 of Imbert et al
(2014), used with permission from Armand Colin.
2
Métropoles d’Amérique latine dans la mondialisation: reconfigurations territoriales mobilité
spatiale, action publique, Bogotá, 2009 (Migrinter, Universidad Externado de Colombia,
Universidad de los Andes); Santiago de Chile, 2009 (L’Institut de recherche pour le
développement, IRD, Universidad Católica de Chile, SUR); São Paulo, 2009 (IRD).
3
Niamey, 2009, IRD.
228
4
See note 1.
5
Supported by INED, 2000–01.
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230
THIRTEEN
Using an intersectional lifecourse

approach to understand the
migration of the highly skilled
Melissa Kelly
Introduction
Understanding why people decide to move is a complicated enterprise
(Bertaux-Wiame, 1979; Ni Laoire, 2000). Although migration may be
a straightforward demographic event, the context in which it occurs
and the mechanisms underlying it are often highly complex, and
require careful study. To begin with, it is important to consider the
individual role of the migrant. To what extent do people move freely
from one place to another, and to what extent are their movements
impacted by structural forces and constraints? Traditional models used
for understanding migration decision making have typically emphasised
either agency or structure but seldom both; moreover, some studies
focus on the macro processes that ‘push’ or ‘pull’ certain categories of
people towards certain environments, while others focus on the micro
processes by which individuals make the decision to move (Halfacree
and Boyle, 1993, p 334). Until recently, bringing the macro and the
micro perspective together under a single theoretical framework was
seldom attempted. Bridging these theoretical gaps – between structure
and agency, and between micro and macro approaches – therefore
remains an important challenge for researchers who want to understand
migration in new and innovative ways.
The literature on skilled migration is perhaps in particular need
of new theoretical and methodological approaches. Traditional
approaches to the study of highly skilled migration emphasise economic
motivations. Macro approaches treat labour as something similar to
capital, which flows freely between countries to meet market demands.
Microeconomic theories (such as human capital theory) emphasise
individual migrants’ determination to maximise their economic
position by finding the best return possible on their skills and education
231
(van Ham et al, 2001). There are, however, many problems with the
underlying assumptions of these migration theories. Macro approaches
assume no barriers to labour movement. But in reality, policy continues
to play a role in directing the flow of labour between countries. Who
moves where may be influenced by immigration policies which target
certain educational, occupational and skill categories while restrictive
policies deter so-called ‘undesirable’ immigrants. Microeconomic
theories, in their turn, do not consider ‘informal training or the role
of institutional factors, discrimination and other factors that lead to
imperfections in the labour market’ (Iredale, 2001, p 8). Furthermore,
it cannot be argued that migrants always act in an inherently economic
rational way, moving to the job that provides the best possible return.
As scholars such as Halfacree (2004) have pointed out, economic
considerations are important and they may very well play a central role,
but it cannot be assumed that economic criteria are the most important.
Other factors must also be taken into consideration, and in order to
identify and understand them, the migration decision making process
must be carefully contextualised (Ackers, 2005).
I begin this chapter by raising some issues for consideration
concerning the conceptualisation of skilled migration. I then go on
to discuss the potential of an intersectional lifecourse approach to
address many of the weaknesses of traditional migration theories by
drawing attention to the context underlying migration processes. Next
I discuss the methodological implications of using such an approach.
More specifically, I highlight how using multiple methods may help
researchers to understand migration processes in a multifaceted way.
I illustrate how the approach advocated in the chapter can be applied
by drawing on a study of highly skilled migrants with an Iranian
background who have chosen to leave Sweden for either London,
UK or Toronto, Canada. Before concluding, I critically reflect on the
approach, and its potential to contribute to migration research.
Structure, agency and skilled migration

Who is a ‘skilled’ migrant? While some definitions provided in
the literature centre on human capital, others focus more on work
experience (Iredale, 2001; Csedo, 2008). In general, however, it could
be said that skilled migrants are seen as having above average levels
of education, work experience and/or skill; consequently they are
generally viewed as more ‘desirable’ than other migrants and hence they
are thought to have more agency than say refugees, whose moves are
generally understood as forced and their choices of destinations limited.
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An intersectional lifecourse approach in migration
It is important to recognise, however, that migrants may be highly

skilled, and still move, for example, through refugee programmes. In
fact, refugees on the whole tend to be more educated and resourceful
than people in similar political situations who choose not to move.
Similarly, some people with high levels of education and skill may
move as dependents rather than as skilled migrants. This is the case for
many highly skilled women, for example, who move as the partners
of highly skilled men (Kofman, 2000). This clearly complicates the
way skilled migration is understood and blurs the line distinguishing
forced and voluntary movements.
If we limit the definition of skilled migration to moves made for
the purpose of securing high skilled employment, it is still important
to acknowledge that opportunities for ‘skilled’ migrants may not be
equal across space and time (Mahroum, 2001). For those migrants
who have rare skills that are also in high demand, for example, there
may be many different opportunities to choose from in a variety of
places. Rather than being forced to take a job in a specific place,
these migrants may choose according to their place preferences. The
market for other migrants’ skills and education may be smaller and
more spatially dispersed; this could create a structural impetus for long-
distance skilled migration (van Ham et al, 2001), especially in a global
economy that encourages a highly mobile skilled labour force (Meyer,
2001). As Ackers (2005, p 104) puts it, ‘The extent to which moves
in search of economic improvement or career progression constitute
a form of voluntary or forced migration depends on context and also
the individual’s perception.’ Depending on their position in the labour
market, as well as a number of other factors, some skilled migrants
may be better placed than others to exercise their place preferences.
Consequently, some migrants are more able to take non-economic
factors, like the social and cultural environment of different places,
into account before choosing where to live.
Economic and sociocultural approaches have typically been kept
separate in the migration studies literature (Koser and Salt, 1997).
But, as already noted, migration even among skilled migrants cannot
be seen simply as an economic event. As Halfacree (2004) has
argued, people’s decisions to move (or not) may also be affected by
lifecourse considerations such as household/family structure, career
opportunities, household income, educational opportunities, and
caring responsibilities. Cultural and class considerations (such as cultural
affiliations, ethnicity, class structure and socioeconomic ideologies) may
also play a role. Faist (2000) similarly points out that local assets, kin
and friends, a familiar language, and a network of people who share
233
one’s ideals in a given place may also factor into decision making.
Finally, as Kofman and Raghuram (2006) remind researchers, migration
decisions are often gendered. The differing roles of men and women in
various societies may also affect people’s evaluations of what different
places have to offer. Depending on how much freedom individuals
have to choose, making the decision to move is likely to be based on
a consideration of several factors simultaneously.
The complexity of the migration decision making process may be
overwhelming for researchers interested in exploring migration in a
multifaceted way. One may not know how to go about empirically
studying migratory movements. Which theories can be used to better
understand migration decision making? While there is no single correct
answer to this question, in what follows I will propose an approach
that, given its focus on context, I believe is particularly apt at linking
macro and micro levels of analysis, and pays due attention to both
the structural and more subjective factors underlying the migration
decisions of the highly skilled.
Using an intersectional lifecourse approach

Both intersectionality and lifecourse approaches are open theoretical
frameworks, and as such, they combine well together. Scholars have
combined the approaches to explore, among other things, gender and
ideology (Vespa, 2009) and relational geographies of age (Hopkins and
Pain, 2007). To my knowledge, however, only a few studies explicitly
study highly skilled or highly educated migration using an approach
similar to what I will advocate here (Kynsilehto, 2011). In what follows
I will briefly outline each of the two approaches separately and review
how they have been taken up in the literature on migration before
discussing how they link together.
According to Hancock (2007, p 63), intersectionality ‘refers to both
a normative theoretical argument and an approach to conducting
empirical research that emphasises the interaction of categories of
difference’. Traditionally, the concept has focused on how the cross-
cutting relationships between race, class and gender position people
hierarchically in a given space–time context. More recent approaches
have tried to expand the concept to include religion and other markers
of difference. Despite my earlier critique of overly economistic
approaches to migration, the fact remains that one of the major factors
affecting migrant mobility is work opportunities, and increasingly such
opportunities are being viewed by researchers in an intersectional way.
There has been a proliferation of studies dealing with the feminisation
234
of migration (Boyle, 2002; Mahler and Pessar, 2006) and these often
relate to opportunities in the labour market for women of certain
class or ethnoracial backgrounds ( Kofman and Raghuram, 2006;
Lutz, 2008). But intersectionality can also go beyond the study of
migration policy issues, to explore how migrants are treated in their
daily lives. Constructions of race, class and gender affect the way
migrants are perceived in different spatial contexts (McDowell, 2008).
As critical race and feminist theorists have emphasised, migrants may
face different types of social inclusion and exclusion when compared
to non-migrants. As Valentine puts it, ‘in particular spaces there are
dominant spatial orderings that produce moments of exclusion for
particular social groups’ (Valentine, 2007, p 19). Clearly this exclusion
may affect migrants’ work experiences but also many other aspects of
their lives.
While it is important to identify and study the structural dimensions
that limit migrant agency, it is also interesting to consider the various
ways migrants challenge the way they are positioned or even strategise
to overcome the constraints they face. In an increasingly global world
where people with certain skills are in demand, highly skilled migrants
in particular may actively choose their destinations based not only on
where they think they will find the highest economic remuneration
for their skills, but also a high level of social acceptance, comfort and
familiarity. Their preferences may be influenced by a range of factors,
many of which were discussed earlier. These may include things such
as the presence of familiar social networks, or having the opportunity
to comfortably practice a specific religion. Linking how the subjectivity
of migrants relates to their position in intersectional social hierarchies,
however, has been underexplored in the migration decision making
literature. Addressing this shortcoming would, I believe, do much
to develop an understanding of the nexus between the structural
constraints migrants face and the ways in which they actively respond
to these structures based on their own agency and subjectivity.
As Hancock (2007, p 74) notes, intersectionality ‘is sympathetic and
applicable to both the structural level of analysis, and individual-level
phenomena’, and as such, it is highly suited to exploring migration
processes in an exploratory and contextualised way. Lives are lived not
only in specific spaces and places, however, but also ‘through time’
(Pratt and Hanson, 1993). For this reason, I think it is productive to
combine intersectionality with a lifecourse approach that considers
how people’s migration decisions are shaped by their individual
life trajectories and individual biographies. Already a number of
researchers have drawn on a lifecourse approach in order to explore
235
how migrants’ place preferences change over the course of their lives
(Ley and Kobayashi, 2005; Kobayashi and Preston, 2007). Such studies
contextualise the decision to move in relation to a number of factors
including the relationships individual migrants maintain with partners,
family members, and friends (Geist and McManus, 2008).
Another strength of the lifecourse approach is that it allows for
the consideration of moves in a long-term perspective. While some
studies only consider what triggers migration decision making (what
happens directly before the move), the decision to move may take
place much earlier in the individual migrant’s lifecourse. As Halfacree
and Boyle (1993, p 337) put it, ‘Of primary importance is a need to
stop regarding migration as a discrete contemplative act but to see it as
“an action in time”’. While in the past, life cycles were understood as

following certain predetermined life phases, more recent approaches
to understanding the lifecourse tend to be flexible, and consider the
various ways events unfold in people’s lives over space and time. As
Heinz and Krüger note, ‘the contemporary life-course approach
examines the interaction between structural constraints, institutional
rules and regulations and subjective meanings as well as decisions over
time’ (Heinz and Krüger, 2001, p 33). Hence, like intersectionality, a
lifecourse approach has the potential to bridge the gap between micro
and macro levels of analysis.
Methodological implications
Although intersectional lifecourse research could be approached in
a number of ways and using a number of different methods, given
their shared focus on temporality, there seems to be a natural affinity
between lifecourse research and biographical methods. Over the past
two decades, several scholars have promoted biographical interview
approaches in particular as a good way to bridge subjectivity with
broader structural processes (Halfacree and Boyle, 1993; Ni Laoire,
2000). Biographical approaches aim to understand how, over the course
of their lives, individuals respond to opportunities and constraints in
certain space–time contexts (Roberts, 2002). Such approaches lend
themselves well to intersectional research on migration. As migrants
move through space and time, the contexts in which they are embedded
are constantly changing. Using a biographical approach can therefore
give researchers insight into how their study participants’ subjectivity
has evolved in response to external factors.
Although biographical research tends to highlight the individual life
trajectory constructed through, for example, qualitative interviews,
236
researchers need not restrict their exploration to individual life stories.

According to Findlay and Li, conceptualising migration as an individual
and a social event also lends itself to the use of multiple data sources. As
they put it, ‘In order to fully capture the multiple meanings of migration
and the diversity of socio-cultural contexts in which migration acts are
embedded, it seems desirable that a range of qualitative and quantitative
techniques should be used in flexible form’ (Findlay and Li, 1999,
p 54). Using multiple methods is one way to help overcome some
of the limitations of single method research. It is also a good way to
capture both description and explanation.
Despite growing enthusiasm for using multiple methods, studies that
draw on a number of dramatically different data sources are limited,
and probably for good reason. Most studies that address migration
processes draw on either large scale datasets or on in-depth qualitative
studies to understand why people move (Andersson, 2012). Typically
researchers select methods in accordance with their epistemological
position, the data that is available to them, as well as the conventions
in their research field, and often none of these are conducive to
conducting multi-method research. For many researchers, there is a
concern that using different methods may lead to a mixing of theoretical
approaches, which can create confusion and a lack of conceptual clarity.
I nevertheless see value in Mason’s (2006) argument that researchers
should be more open to conducting studies based on multiple methods
if doing so strengthens the theoretical basis of their work.
Drawing on different qualitative and quantitative techniques can be
highly rewarding for researchers interested in advancing a theoretical
perspective that aims to bridge structure and agency, or to link the
macro and micro dimensions of migration decision making. In the next
section of this chapter I will illustrate how such an approach might be
applied, by drawing on a four-year doctoral study I conducted with
highly educated migrants who moved first to Sweden as refugees,
before voluntarily moving on to a third country (Kelly, 2013; Kelly
and Hedman, 2015).
Case study: highly educated Iranians leaving Sweden

Sweden is a generous welfare state renowned for its relatively open
migration policies, and willingness to provide all of its residents with
access to affordable healthcare, free education, and a number of other
benefits. It has therefore been surprising to both academics and the
wider population to learn that in recent years many people with
migrant backgrounds have shown a tendency to leave the country for
237
onward destinations. Nekby’s (2006) finding that many of the migrants

that move onward tend to have above average levels of education has
furthermore raised concern that this onward migration trend may
point to a loss of human capital for Sweden.
When I began the project, my goal was to understand the
understudied process of onward migration in all its complexity. At first
I tried to keep an open mind concerning what I might find. My study
could not, however, be considered grounded theory since from the very
start of the research process I had a theoretical interest in exploring how
both macro and micro factors had shaped the migration decisions of
the people under study. My interest in capturing the complexity and
nuances of migration processes also meant that I had to decide how
to narrow the study. Should I focus on onward migrants belonging
to one specific occupational category? Or perhaps people from one
specific country of origin? I soon decided that by focusing on one
specific migrant category, I would be able to draw out a specific group
of people’s particular experience of living between countries, and to
situate individual lives in spatial and historical context.
My topic became more clearly defined when I learned from Swedish
statistics that people with Iranian backgrounds are one of the migrant
categories that tend to leave Sweden for countries like the UK, Canada
and the US at rates significantly higher than the Swedish average
(GeoSweden, 2006).1 According to the figures, out of a population of
more than 50,000, 500 to 1,000 Iranian born persons leave Sweden
every year, with 70–80% moving to a third country and the rest
returning to Iran (GeoSweden, 2008; Kelly and Hedman, 2015).
The statistics also show that many of these migrants appear to have
education levels above the Swedish average. This led to a number of
further questions concerning how and why these migrants may choose
to leave Sweden.
Employing an intersectional lifecourse approach: method and

analysis
Since my aim was to capture the phenomenon of highly educated

onward migration from different perspectives, I devised a sequential
design (Leech and Onwuegbuzie, 2009). I decided to start with a macro
perspective (descriptive statistics), move to the meso level (interviews
with organisations) and finish at the micro level (interviews with
individual onward migrants). Adopting this multi-scalar approach
allowed me to thoroughly contextualise the study in a way that would
not have been possible had I simply chosen to focus on one scale of
238
analysis. Moreover, it allowed for the linking of objective and subjective

perspectives on the phenomenon under study.
Using a detailed population database derived from Swedish
government statistics (GeoSweden, 2006; 2008), I was able to identify
several of the structural difficulties faced by ‘Iranian born’ people in
Sweden. According to available figures, Iranian-born people have the
highest education level of all major immigrant groups in Sweden, and
are 8% more likely than Swedes as a whole to attain tertiary education.
Despite this, statistics also show that in 2008 the employment rate of
Iranian born people was below 60% (GeoSweden, 2008; Kelly and
Hedman, 2015). This mismatch between education and employment
is contradictory and points to the presence of structural constraints
that limit the labour market participation of highly educated Iranians
in Sweden. By using the database I was also able to compare those
Iranians that moved on with those that stayed in terms of their
employment, education and housing characteristics. Importantly, I
found that it tends to be the highly educated but unemployed who
leave Sweden for onward destinations. This material served as highly
valuable background information for the study as a whole. However,
in order to understand the specific structural contexts faced by highly
educated Iranian onward migrants and, more importantly, to capture
the subjectivity of these migrants, qualitative information was also
needed.
I chose to conduct semi-structured interviews with Iranian
organisations in Sweden in order to develop an understanding of the
institutions serving the interests of Iranians and, also through speaking
to leaders of these organisations, to develop a better knowledge of the
challenges facing Iranians in Sweden. How did the leaders view the
position of Iranians in Swedish society, and what opportunities and
challenges did they think Iranians had experienced in Sweden since
their arrival in the country? The organisation leaders emphasised that,
according to their observations, Iranians have faced difficulties achieving
full economic and social integration into Swedish society. Many of
the leaders interviewed attributed this to the discrimination Iranians
continue to face in Sweden on account of their refugee backgrounds
and association with the Islamic Middle East, something which has
furthered stereotyping and, hence, negatively impacted many different
aspects of their lives, including but not only their labour market
experiences. According to these leaders, many Iranians in Sweden
hold professional qualifications, but cannot find work. Moreover, many
Iranians suffer from a belief that they are not welcome in Sweden,
and therefore it is difficult for them to cultivate a sense of belonging
239
to the society. These findings provided possible interpretations of the

statistical data, and aided the facilitation and analysis of the biographical
interviews conducted with individual onward migrants themselves.
Individual onward migrants were recruited in two popular onward
destinations: London, UK and Toronto, Canada. All were highly
educated and had lived in Sweden for at least five years. The interviews
were conducted in two parts. In the first interview, I asked the
participants to tell their life stories freely, with as little interruption as
possible. In the second meeting I asked more direct (semi-structured)
questions, to make sure that my research agenda was addressed.
Adopting this method allowed me to both chart the personal life
trajectories of the participants and to explore their subjectivity. The
majority of the participants presented what could be considered
narratives of success as they talked about overcoming obstacles (economic,
cultural and social) by moving on to places like London and Toronto
which they characterised as multicultural cities that were very open
to skilled migrants. Despite their high levels of education and skill, in
Sweden the participants found it difficult to break free from stereotypes
concerning refugees, while in these new contexts, they felt that they
were perceived and accepted as middle class skilled migrants. The fact
that many of the participants moved to London or Toronto through
skilled migration programmes or to fill highly skilled positions helped
to reinforce this perception.
The finding that the individual research participants were anxious
to move on to further their careers was consistent with the findings
generated by the statistical data, and the interviews with organisations,
and therefore helped to produce a possible explanation as to why highly
educated and highly skilled Iranians might choose to leave Sweden. I
nevertheless decided to take the analysis of the biographical narratives a
step further. In doing so, I separated what events had actually occurred
in the participants’ life stories (the ‘facts’), with the way they talked
about these events (Wengraf, 2001). What I found was that while
most participant narratives emphasised a desire to overcome perceived
constraints in Sweden, there was more to their migration decision
making than this alone. Instead, participants’ positions in class, gender
and race hierarchies intersected with turning points in the lifecourse:
finishing university studies, becoming unemployed, or breaking up
with a partner, to influence the timing and motives behind onward
moves. While many of the younger participants had experienced
racial discrimination throughout their lives, for example, it was on
trying to enter the labour market that this was fully realised, and also
when it became a practical obstacle that, as they viewed it, had to
240
be overcome. Moreover, while many of the female participants, like

their male counterparts, emphasised how leaving Sweden had helped
them to achieve their career ambitions, it was later revealed that many
also moved not only to escape racism and discrimination, but also in
response to shifting gender dynamics in their homes, or in order to
support their male partners who had initiated the decision to relocate.
The findings therefore suggest that migration should not be viewed
as an isolated event, but rather as something entangled in the broader
lifecourse which is inherently implicated by social power hierarchies.
The benefits and drawbacks of using an intersectional

lifecourse approach
In my view, an intersectional lifecourse approach has much to offer
researchers interested in exploring why certain patterns of migration
occur. Unlike more conventional approaches to migration studies, the
approach allows for migration processes to be studied from multiple
perspectives, at different levels of scale. This may be particularly valuable
to studies of highly skilled migration, which, as noted earlier, tend to
be based on economistic approaches which fail to capture relations
between the objective and subjective, and the macro and micro factors
underlying migration decision making. With its focus on context, the
approach may also be of particular value to those wishing to explore
understudied population movements on which little is currently
known; one particular strength of the approach is that it lends itself to
the disruption of the taken-for-granted categories that are usually used
to classify migrants. In the case study outlined above, for example, the
approach made it possible to challenge the binary between ‘refugee’
and ‘skilled’ migration, and to instead contribute to an understanding
of the relatively underutilised concept of ‘onward migration’ (Lindley
and van Hear, 2007; Ahrens et al, 2014).
For those interested in employing the approach advocated in this
chapter, however, there are a number of important things that must
be taken into consideration. This is not an approach that leads directly
to generalisable findings. On the contrary, it is best suited to small
scale case study research. Adopting such an approach requires one
to be quite open, theoretically and methodologically. This carries
both potential risks and potential benefits. The result may be that
one can produce a very in-depth, nuanced account of a migration
phenomenon, something which may lead to unique findings and
new perspectives. Furthermore, by drawing on multiple methods, the
approach may provide valuable pathways to explanation not normally
241
afforded by studies based on individual methods. In the case study

shared above, for example, combining three different data sources
made it possible to capture both group and individual perspectives
on onward migration. It was also possible to get an in-depth sense of
the structures influencing the migration decisions of highly educated
Iranian migrants, and the ways in which individual migrants have used
their own agency to overcome some of these structural constraints.
It is important to point out, however, that when it comes to research
design, using more than one method is not an inherent strength. If not
handled cautiously, using multiple methods may have many drawbacks.
If a research study is spread out too thinly between different methods,
the findings generated by any one of the methods may be insufficient.
There is also no guarantee that the findings generated by the different
methods will fit together in a meaningful and coherent way. Caution
should therefore be taken to ensure the utility of each data source in
relation to the larger aims of the project. Multiple method research
designs tend to be more complex than single method designs, and it
is therefore important to reflect on what one wants to achieve with
his or her study early during the research design phase.
Beyond these central theoretical and methodological concerns are
practical considerations. Adopting an intersectional lifecourse approach
does not necessarily need to be costly, but particularly if multiple types
of data sources are drawn on, researchers should think carefully about
what resources they have at their disposal. Conducting a study of the
kind advocated here requires a great deal of time and access to resources.
In the illustrative case study, for example, access to statistical databases
had to be secured, and it was necessary to find research participants
and conduct interviews in multiple places. Moreover, adopting such
an approach requires a great number of competencies and skills on the
part of the researcher. Few researchers have the capacity to successfully
use multiple data collection methods, especially when these methods
transcend the well-established boundary between quantitative and
qualitative modes of inquiry. It may therefore be worth conducting
research of this kind as part of a team, or by seeking the assistance of
researchers who have the specialised skills needed to successfully carry
out certain types of data collection.
Conclusion
The chapter began by reviewing the literature on skilled migration
which tends to be polarised by macro and micro (economic)
perspectives. In order to overcome this divide, and also to address
242
the issue of structure and agency in migration decision making

more broadly, the chapter outlined what can be gained by using an
intersectional lifecourse approach. This approach, it was argued, makes
it possible to develop a nuanced understanding of the structures that
play a role in migration decision making, while not compromising the
subjectivity and agency of migrants themselves. In order to maximise
the potential benefits of using this approach, the chapter advocated
the use of research designs that utilise multiple methods which are
capable of capturing both the structural and the individual aspects of
migration decision making.
Multifaceted approaches to the study of migration decision making
like the one proposed in this chapter tend to be much more demanding
both theoretically and methodologically than conventional approaches
to migration research. I nevertheless think they are necessary to
move migration research forward. While we still need studies that
strictly address either the macro or the micro facets of the migration
decision making process, the time is ripe for acknowledging their
interrelatedness and exploring it further. Like many of the migration
researchers I have cited in this chapter, I believe this is best done by
cultivating a greater openness to social theory and encouraging the
adoption of more innovative methodological approaches.
Note
1
GeoSweden is a longitudinal database that contains micro-data on the entire Swedish
population. It is owned by the Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala
University.
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Index
Index
Note: page numbers in italic type refer to figures and tables.
A biographical matrices, of residential

mobility 219, 220–4
Ackers, L. 233
biographical narratives
action research 9–10
construction of 54
Adam, B. 32, 33–5
geobiographies 162–3, 165–6, 172
affect, and embodiment 155
and geographic narratives 115
age, concepts of 3–4
research with young people
agency
initial choice of methods 102–7
and bottom-up approach 29–30
spatialising methodology 109–13
of children 125, 126, 136
role of time and place in 107–9
of migrants 235
see also life geohistories; life histories
Akesson, B. 16, 130–1, 134
biographical time 57, 58
American Association of Geographers
biological ageing 3
(AAG) 1–2
Blaakilde, A.L. 17
analysis
Blaut, J. 123
of embodied interaction 205–9
Bondi, L. 156
of life space trajectories 224–7
bottom-up methodology 29–31
of maps 133–6
boundary objects 7
narrative analysis 114–15, 116
Bourdieu, P. 164
of onward migration research 240–1
Bowlby, S. 16
of personal communities research
Boyden, J. 134
151–4
British Household Panel Survey
qualitative approach 8
(BHPS) 46, 48, 50, 52–3, 56, 58
quantitative approach 8
British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS)
of secondary data 51–5, 56–7, 70
46, 48, 50, 52, 53
of transnational ethnographic research
Brown, R.K. 68
193–4
anchors, as aid to recall 88–9
anonymisation 71 C
autoethnography 191 cancer patient research 82–6
career, concept of 3
B caringscapes 144–5
Carolan, M.S. 166
Banks, M. 133–4
causality 34, 109
Barrett, H. 130, 131, 132–3
Census data 7, 8
Basso, K. 207
children
Bell, A.J. 89, 92, 93
mapmaking with 123–4
Berger, J. 124
children’s abilities 127–9
Berthoud, R. 27
interpretation and analysis 133–6
biographical approaches, in
multi-method approach 132–3
intersectional lifecourse approach
as participatory 125–6, 136
236–7
theoretical underpinnings 124–5,
biographical identifiers 71, 74
136
247
as viable methodology 129–32 critique and recall strategies 86–92

in participatory research 10, 125–6, use in cancer patient research 82–6
136 secondary analysis of 51
representations of 124–5 see also methodology and methods
Christou, A. 184–5 data sources 7–8
chronological age 3 in mixed methods approach 45–50,
chronological order 56
in biographical narratives 107–9 see also secondary data
in lifegrid method 90–1 Davies, J. 199
chronological time 33, 35, 57 De Lay, B. 130, 131
chronotope 108 deindustrialisation 64–5
Clark, A. 132, 135 Del Bianco, A. 15
class, and intersectionality 234, 235 demography, evolving approaches in
classic studies see legacy studies 217–18
clock time see chronological time discourse analysis 193–4
co-construction of knowledge 209 diversity, and ethics 11
cohorts 5 documentary evidence, in lifegrid
communities method 92
in research with children 125 Dunning, E. 66, 67
see also personal communities Dureau, F. 17–18
contextual public/collective time
in mixed methods analysis 57–8
see also external events
E
continuities–discontinuities dimension economic motivations for migration
of time 37 231–2
Edwards, R. 14
Courgeau, D. 217, 218 Elder, G. 30
cross-referencing, as aid to recall 90 elderly migrants see international
cross-sectional (transversal) approach retirement migration
in demography 217 Elias, Norbert
transformed to longitudinal see approach to research 66–7
restudy of young workers project archived papers 70–1
cultural differences restudying work of see restudy of
concepts of life span 28 young workers project
concepts of time 34–5 embodied experience
and research 11 Merleau-Ponty’s concept of 203
use of walking tours 109–13
embodied interaction
D analytical approach to 205–9
Darbyshire, P. 134–5 and co-construction of knowledge
data, respondents’ access to 75–7 209
data analysis fieldwork with elderly migrants
life space trajectories 224–7 199–200, 204–5
maps 133–6 and women’s personal communities
onward migration research 240–1 155
personal communities research 151–4 embodied maps 206–7
qualitative approach 8 embodied understanding 163–4
quantitative approach 8 emotional responses of interviewers
of secondary data 51–5, 56–7, 70 155–6
transnational ethnographic research employment see labour market
193–4 Ennew, J. 134
data collection epistemology
event histories approach 218–19 haptic epistemology 201–4
of life space trajectories 220–4 of lifecourse approach 6–12
lifegrid method
248
Index
erotic, Marks’ concept of 202, 203, GRAB (Groupe de Recherche sur

205–6 l’Approche Biographique) 216, 219
ethics 10–12 Gubrium, J. 28, 33, 35
anonymisation and restudies 71
in elderly migrant research 210
and online observation 190–1, 193
H
in personal communities research habitus 164
150, 156–7 haptic epistemology 201–4
in transnational ethnography 190–1, Hardill, I. 9
192–3 Health see cancer patient research
ethnography Heinz, W. 30
epistemological issues 202–3 historical truths, and lifegrid method
see also international retirement 88, 93–4
migration; transnational Holstein, J. 28, 33, 35
ethnography Housing see residential mobility
event history approach 218–19 Hughes, J. 66, 67
life space data analysis 224–7
life space data collection 220–4 I
event observation 189, 190
external events, and lifegrids 83, 88 ICT
online observation 189, 190–1, 193
use in women’s personal communities
F 144, 154
Falola, B. 15–16 Imbert, C. 17–18
families individual observation 189–90
diversity among 11 intensive–extensive dimension of time
impact on life space trajectories 227 36
involvement in lifegrid method 91 intergenerationality 5
in research with children 125 international ethnography see
family cycle 3 transnational ethnography
field notes see interviewer notes international retirement migration
Findlay, A. 237 (IRM)
flashbulb memory cues 83 categorisations 200
fluidity of time 34–5 research on
friendship see personal communities co-construction of knowledge 209
embodied interaction 205–9
ethics 210
G fieldwork experience 199–200,
Geertz, C. 202 204–5
gender, and migration 234, 235, 241 interpretation of maps 133–6
generation, concept of 5, 28 intersectional lifecourse approach
geobiographies 234–6
concept of 162–3 benefits and drawbacks 241–2
and lifestories 165–6, 172 methodology 236–7
geographic narratives 115 migration case study 238–41
geohabits 166–7 interviewer notes
Gershunny, J. 27 and restudies 70, 76
Giele, J. 30 in transnational ethnography 188
Giroud, M. 17–18 interviewers
GIS 103 discomfort of 174
softGIS 166–7, 169, 171–2, 175 emotional responses of 155–6
go-along interviews (walking tours) and positionality 185, 188, 192–3,
109–13, 168–9, 173–4 195
Goodwin, J. 14 interviews
completion of lifegrids in 82–3
249
go-along interviews (walking tours) life histories

109–13, 168–9, 173–4 in demography 217–18
with migrant returnees 187–8, and geobiographies 165–6, 172
191–2, 192–3 research with migrants see Korean
in onward migration research 239, New Zealander migrant returnees
240 research with young people see young
in personal communities research people
148–51, 152 see also biographical narratives; life
in research with young people 103, geohistories
109–13 life space trajectories
in residential mobility research 220, data analysis 224–7
223 data collection 220–4
in restudy of young workers project life stages 27
71–2 lifecourse, conceptualising 2–6, 25–6,
use in lifecourse research 8 27–8, 31
Iranian migrants, case study 237–41 lifecourse approach
in demography 217–18
methodology and epistemology 1–2,
K 6–12
Karjalainen, P.T. 162 see also intersectional lifecourse
Kelly, M. 18 approach
Korean New Zealander migrant lifecourse research, classic studies as
returnees 183 starting point for 65–8
advantages of life history approach lifecourse tables, in personal
195–6 communities research 149–51, 152
data analysis 193–4 lifegrid
methodological context of research critique and recall strategies 86–92
184–7 narrative and historical truths 93–4
research ethics and positionality use in cancer patient research 82–6
192–3 Lindsay, R. 14
research methods 187–92 longitudinal approach
in demography 217
L qualitative longitudinal (QL) research
26
labour market bottom-up methodology 29–31
changes in 64–5 concept of time in 35
and skilled migration 231–2, 233 micro and macro approaches in
Laub, J.H. 67–8 31–2
Law, J. 1 longitudinal studies
Lee, J.Y. 17 created by restudy see restudy of
legacy (classic) studies young workers project
Elias’s young workers project 63–4, mixed methods secondary analysis
68–9 concepts of time 51–5, 57–9
background to restudy 63–5 data analysis 51–5, 56–7
design and operationalisation of research design 44–50, 56
restudy 69–73 quantitative 26, 30, 32
methodological reflections on top-down methodology 29
restudy 73–7 of twentieth century 2–3
as starting point for lifecourse research
65–8
Leitch, R. 130 M
Li, L.N. 237 McDowell, L. 9
life geohistories 101–2, 113–15 macrodynamic approach 27, 31–2
macroeconomic approach to migration
231–2
250
Index
Malinowski, B. 202 motives for 231–2, 233–4, 235,

Mannheim, K. 5 240–1
mapmaking 123 onward migration case study 237–41
with children 123–4 see also international retirement
children’s abilities 127–9 migration; Korean New Zealander
interpretation and analysis 133–6 migrant returnees; residential
multi-method approach 132–3 mobility
as participatory 125–6, 136 Mills, C.W. 31
theoretical underpinnings 124–5, mixed methods approach 10
136 in secondary research
as viable methodology 129–32 concepts of time 51–5, 57–9
mapping, with young people 103–6 data analysis 51–5, 56–7
maps research design 44–50, 56
analysis of 133–6 see also multi-method approach;
embodied 206–7 triangulation
Marks, L.U. 201–2, 203, 205–6, 208 mobilities
Mass Observation Project (MOP) in lifecourse research 16–18
45–6, 48, 49, 52, 53–4, 56, 58–9 see also migration; residential
memory mobility
materialised 207–9 mobility maps 130, 131
see also recall Mosaic approach 132
memory cues 72, 83 multi-local, concepts of 215
mental decline, of elderly migrants multi-method approach
204–5, 206–7, 208–9 in research with children 132–3
MEREV research programme 216, 228 to migration 237, 241–2
data analysis 224–7 see also mixed methods approach;
data collection 220–4 triangulation
Merleau-Ponty, M. 203, 207 multi-residence
Metcalfe, E. 14 data analysis 224–7
methodology and methods data collection 220–4
of embodied interaction 205–9 definition 219
in intersectional lifecourse research
236–7
of lifecourse approach 1–2, 6–12,
N
29–31, 32 narrative analysis 114–15, 116
mapmaking as participatory 125–6, narrative truths, and lifegrid method
136 93–4
restudy reflections 73–7 narratives see biographical narratives; life
in transnational ethnographic research histories
184–92 Neale, B. 14
see also data collection; interviews; New Dynamics of Ageing Research
research design; walking interviews/ Programme (NDA) 4
tours New Zealand see Korean New
microdynamic approach 28, 31–2 Zealander migrant returnees
microeconomic approach to migration
231–2 O
micro–meso–macro dimension of time
36 observation 188–9, 192–3
migration epistemological issues 202–3
intersectional lifecourse approach see also walking interviews/tours
234–6, 241–2 O’Connor, H. 14
intersectional lifecourse methodology older people
236–7 study of 4
in lifecourse research 16–18, 235–6 see also international retirement
migration
251
online observation 189, 190–1, 193 preparedness 163–4

onward migration case study 237–41 Psathas, G. 133
P Q
Pahl, R. 148–9 qualitative longitudinal (QL) research
Parry, O. 93 26
participant observation bottom-up methodology 29–31
epistemological issues 202–3 concept of time in 35
with migrant returnees 188, 192–3 micro and macro approaches in 31–2
participants see respondents qualitative panel studies (QPS) 32
participatory research 9–10 qualitative research
children in 10, 125–6, 136 methods 8–10
past and present, in restudies 72–3, use of lifegrids in 92–3
74, 77 see also discourse analysis; interviews;
past–present–future 35–6, 162 mixed methods approach;
personal communities participatory research
definition 143 quantitative research 7–8
research on women’s 157–8 longitudinal studies 26, 30, 32
background 143–4 see also mixed methods approach;
data analysis 151–4 questionnaires
difficulties and dilemmas 154–7 questionnaires
research design and sample 145–51 in residential mobility research 220,
personal events 221–3, 224
as aid to recall 88–9 softGIS 166–7, 169, 171–3, 175
and life space trajectories 227 tables in personal communities
personal reflection, in qualitative research 149–50, 152
research 9 in volunteering research 51, 52
phenomenology 9, 203, 207
photographs, in restudy interviews
72–3
R
Pink, Sarah 207 race, and intersectionality 234, 235
place making 207 re-returnees, in transnational research
place and space 191–2
in lifecourse research 15–16 recall
life geohistories 113–15 materialised memory 207–9
with young people 102–7, 109–13 of residential mobility 223–4
studies of age and 4 and secondary data analysis 52, 54
and temporal structure of biographies recall strategies 72, 83, 88–92
107–9 reflexive writing 194
time–space dimension 37 see also self-observation
in women’s caringscapes 144–5 refugees 233, 239, 240
see also geobiographies; mapmaking; relationships see personal communities
residential mobility research design
political aspects of research 10–12 mixed methods secondary analysis
political violence, mapping experience 44–50, 56
of see mapmaking onward migration case study 238–40
Portelli, A. 165 residential mobility research 220–4
positionality women’s personal communities 145,
in transnational ethnography 184–6, 148–51
188, 192–3, 195 young workers restudy 69–73
see also ethics see also methods and methodology
post-phenomenology 203, 207 research sites
power relations 11 Canada, 81
Denmark, 199
252
Index
Finland, 161 women’s personal communities

France, 215 145–8
Iran, 231 Sampson, R.J. 67–8
Korea, 183 Savage, M. 70, 73–4
New Zealand, 183 scaling up, of research 32
Palestine, 123 Schmidt-Thomé, K. 16
Sweden, 231 secondary data 43
Turkey, 199 mixed methods approach
United Kingdom, 25, 43, 63, 143 concepts of time 51–5, 57–9
United States, 101 data analysis 51–5, 56–7
researchers research design 44–50, 56
in co-construction of knowledge 209 see also legacy studies
discomfort of 174 self-observation 189, 191, 193
emotional responses of 155–6 self-reflexive writing 194
positionality of 184–6, 188, 192–3, senses, and haptic epistemology 201–4
195 shared corporeal experiences 207
residential mobility see also embodied interaction
conceptualisations of 215 Shotter, J. 163–4
life space data analysis 224–7 site observation 189, 190
life space data collection 220–4 skilled migration
lifecourse approach to 216–19 case study 237–41
respondents conceptualisations of 232–4
access to data in restudies 75–7 micro and macro influences 231–2
profiles 169–70 migrant agency 235
tracing for restudy 71, 74–5 Sobel, D. 123–4, 128
see also children social construction
restudy of young workers project age as 3–4
background 63–5 of lifecourse 28
design and operationalisation 69–73 social networking sites 144, 154, 190–1
methodological reflections 73–7 softGIS 166–7, 169, 171–2, 175
original study 63–4, 68–9 space and place
retirement see international retirement in lifecourse research 15–16
migration life geohistories 113–15
return migration with young people 102–7, 109–13
Korean New Zealander migrant and temporal structure of biographies
returnees 183 107–9
advantages of life history approach time–space dimension 37
195–6 in women’s caringscapes 144–5
data analysis 193–4 see also geobiographies; mapmaking;
methodological context of research residential mobility
184–7 Spencer, L. 148–9
research ethics and positionality spousal involvement, in lifegrid method
192–3 91
research methods 187–92 storyworlds 108
of retirees 200–1 surveys 7–8, 26, 29, 32
Richardson, J.C. 92 Sweden, onward migration from
Ricoeur, P. 208 237–41
Roos, J.P. 165 synchronicity 37
Rowles, G. 9
T
S Thomas, W.I. 2
sampling time and temporality
in mixed methods approach 49–50 concepts of 32–8
in qualitative research 8–9
253
in lifecourse research 13–15, 26, V

35–8
van Gennep, A. 6, 25
in lifegrid method 89–90
visual data, map analysis 133–6
and place in biographical narratives
visual methods
107–9
in research with young people 104–6
in restudies 72–3, 74, 77
in restudy of young workers project
in secondary data analysis 51–5, 57–9
72–3
in women’s caringscapes 144
see also mapmaking
time–space dimension 37
visualisation 103
timing of data analysis 56
volunteering attitudes study
Tolfree, D. 135–6
concepts of time in 51–5, 57–9
Tolia-Kelly, D. 167
data analysis 51–5, 56–7
top-down methodology 29, 30–1
research design 44–50, 56
touch, and embodied interaction
205–6
trajectories W
concept of 5–6, 25–6 walking interviews/tours 109–13,
in lifegrids 83, 90 168–9, 173–4
personal communities in context of Wilding, R. 186
143 Wilson, S. 93
see also life space trajectories; young women’s personal communities 157–8
people background to research 143–4
transcription of data 69–70 data analysis 151–4
transitions research design and sample 145–51
concept of 5–6, 27 research difficulties and dilemmas
experience and recall of 54 154–7
in lifegrids 83, 90 Woodhead, M. 135–6
school to work see restudy of young work see labour market; young people
workers project
transnational ethnography
Korean New Zealander migrant Y
returnees 183 Young, L. 130, 131, 132–3
advantages of life history approach young people
195–6 researching life trajectories of
data analysis 193–4 initial choice of methods 102–7
methodological context of research spatialising methodology 109–13
184–7 restudy of young workers project
research ethics and positionality background 63–5
192–3 design and operationalisation 69–73
research methods 187–92 methodological reflections 73–7
see also international retirement original study 63–4, 68–9
migration
transversal approach see cross-sectional
approach Z
triangulation 164–71 Znaniecki, F. 2
see also mixed methods approach;
multi-method approach
Tsuda, T. 184–5
U
Understanding Society (US) survey 46,
50, 52–3, 56, 58
Urban Happiness project 166–7, 171–3
254
“A highly provocative and engaging work, raising questions about the
epistemology of lifecourse research across themes of time, space and
RESEARCHING THE LIFECOURSE • Edited by Nancy Worth and Irene Hardill

mobilities.”
Professor Jeylan Mortimer, University of Minnesota, USA
“Clearly and engagingly written, this collection illustrates and reflects on
diverse methodologies for enriching lifecourse studies . It is a major resource
for researchers across the social sciences.”
RESEARCHING THE
Professor Janice Monk, University of Arizona, USA
The lifecourse perspective continues to be an important subject in the social

sciences. Researching the Lifecourse offers a distinctive approach in that it Critical reflections from the social sciences
truly covers the lifecourse (childhood, adulthood and older age), focusing
on innovative methods and case study examples from a variety of European
and North American contexts. This original approach connects theory Edited by
and practice from across the social sciences by situating methodology Nancy Worth and Irene Hardill
and research design within relevant conceptual frameworks. This diverse
collection features methods that are linked to questions of time, space and
mobilities while providing practitioners with practical detail in each chapter.
NANCY WORTH is a Banting Fellow in the School of Geography and Earth Sciences at
McMaster University, Canada. Co-editor of Intergenerational Space (Routledge, 2014), her
work focuses on the geographies of youth and young adulthood.
IRENE HARDILL is Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Centre for Civil Society and
Citizenship, Northumbria University, UK. Co-author of Enterprising Care (Policy Press, 2011),
her work focuses on theorising work (paid and unpaid).
RESEARCH METHODS / GEOGRAPHY
ISBN 978-1-4473-1752-4
www.policypress.co.uk
9 781447 317524
@policypress PolicyPress
Researching the lifecourse_PPC.indd 1 5/29/2015 9:20:55 AM

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RESEARCHING THE

Critical reflections from the social sciences

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978 1 44731 752 4 hardcover

Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race,

Cover design by Policy Press

Part II: Space and place

Part III: Mobilities

Anne Leonora Blaakilde is associate professor at Department of

Sophie Bowlby is visiting professor in geography at Loughborough

Ann Del Bianco is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Environmental

Françoise Dureau is honorary research director in geography and

Universitaires de Rennes); Mobilités et changement urbain: Bogotá, Santiago

Rosalind Edwards is professor of sociology, social sciences director

Bisola Falola is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography

Matthieu Giroud is assistant professor in geography at Université

John Goodwin is professor of sociology at the University of Leicester,

Irene Hardill is professor of public policy and director of the

Christophe Imbert is assistant professor in geography, Université

Melissa Kelly is a postdoctoral fellow in the Narrative Study of Lives

Jane Yeonjae Lee is a postdoctoral fellow at the Humanities Center

Rose Lindsey is based in the division of Sociology, Social Policy

Elizabeth Metcalfe currently works as a quantitative researcher on

project, she will undertake a position as a statistical analyst at the Office

Bren Neale is professor of life course and family research in the

Henrietta O’Connor is professor of sociology at the Department

Kaisa Schmidt-Thomé holds a licentiate in planning geography at

Nancy Worth is a Banting Fellow in the School of Geography and

Lifecourse research is undertaken by researchers from across the social

to be adapted carefully to fit our inquiries, thinking through multiple

Conceptualising the lifecourse: age, generation and

human lives and development. The changing demographic profile of

Age from a lifecourse approach

Before we go further we will distinguish age as biological/physiological

the life course is organized around the system of labour that

Work also structures many of our transitions through the lifecourse

Generation and intergenerationality

Generation is employed within the social sciences as a way of temporally

Transitions and trajectories

Finally, a recent development in lifecourse research involves paying

which can be conceived of as pathways. Many researchers trace research

Lifecourse methodology and epistemological choices

know’ (Knorr-Cetina, 1999, p 1). Building on work in science studies,

The application of quantitative methods in lifecourse research is

An array of qualitative methods characterises much lifecourse research.

proportionality is not the main concern. Purposive sampling is not

contemporary technologies, such as community radio and TV, popular

For a number of years lifecourse researchers have combined the

Ethics and positionality

Recurring themes in methodological discussions in the lifecourse

Time, space and mobilities: the organisation of the

methodology are implicated in our thinking on the lifecourse – why the

Time and temporality are critical to lifecourse research (Mills, 2000).

Space and place

experience of growing up. The knowledge generated by this method

Moreover, lifecourse researchers have been interested in how lifecourse

trajectories’. Dureau et al’s work illustrates the usefulness of typologies

Bissell, D. (2014) ‘Commuting and the multiple capacities of stillness’,

Kindon, S., Pain, R., and Kesby, M. (2008) ‘Participatory action

Time and the lifecourse:

This quotation from an early ‘armchair’ anthropologist reflects much of

The flow of lives…